The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
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Title: The English Novel and the Principle of its Development
Author: Sidney Lanier
Release date: March 19, 2012 [eBook #39200]
Language: English
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THE
ENGLISH NOVEL
AND THE
PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT
BY
SIDNEY LANIER
LECTURER IN JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR OF
"THE SCIENCE OF ENGLISH VERSE"
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1883
GRANT, FAIRES & RODGERS,
PHILADELPHIA.
* * * * *
PREFATORY NOTE.
The following chapters were originally delivered as public lectures at
Johns Hopkins University, in the winter and spring of 1881. Had Mr.
Lanier lived to prepare them for the press, he would probably have
recast them to some extent; but the present editor has not felt free
to make any changes from the original manuscript, beyond the omission
of a few local and occasional allusions, and the curtailment of
several long extracts from well-known writers.
Although each is complete in itself, this work and its foregoer, _The
Science of English Verse_, were intended to be parts of a
comprehensive philosophy of formal and substantial beauty in
literature, which, unhappily, the author did not live to develop.
W. H. B.
* * * * *
THE ENGLISH NOVEL
AND THE
PRINCIPLE OF ITS DEVELOPMENT.
I.
The series of lectures which I last had the pleasure of delivering in
this hall was devoted to the exposition of what is beyond doubt the
most remarkable, the most persistent, the most wide-spread, and the
most noble of all those methods of arranging words and ideas in
definite relations, which have acquired currency among men--namely,
the methods of verse, or Formal Poetry. That exposition began by
reducing all possible phenomena of verse to terms of vibration; and
having thus secured at once a solid physical basis for this science,
and a precise nomenclature in which we could talk intelligibly upon
this century-befogged subject, we advanced gradually from the most
minute to the largest possible considerations upon the matter in hand.
Now, wishing that such courses as I might give here should preserve a
certain coherence with each other, I have hoped that I could secure
that end by successively treating The Great Forms of Modern
Literature; and, wishing further to gain whatever advantage of
entertainment for you may lie in contrast and variety, I have thought
that inasmuch as we have already studied the Verse-Form in General, we
might now profitably study some great Prose-Forms in Particular, and
in still further contrast; that we might study that form not so much
_analytically_--as when we developed the _Science_ of Formal Poetry
from a single physical principle--but this time synthetically, from
the point of view of literary _art_ rather than of literary science.
I am further led to this general plan by the consideration that so far
as I know--but my reading in this direction is not wide, and I may be
in error--there is no book extant in any language which gives a
conspectus of all those well-marked and widely-varying literary forms
which have differentiated themselves in the course of time, and of the
curious and subtle needs of the modern civilized man which, under the
stress of that imperious demand for expression which all men's
emotions make, have respectively determined the modes of such
expression to be in one case _The Novel_, in another _The Sermon_, in
another _The Newspaper Leader_, in another _The Scientific Essay_, in
another _The Popular Magazine Article_, in another _The
Semi-Scientific Lecture_, and so on: each of these prose-forms, you
observe, having its own limitations and fitnesses quite as
well-defined as the Sonnet-Form, the Ballad-Form, the Drama-Form, and
the like in verse.
And, with this general plan, a great number of considerations which I
hope will satisfactorily emerge as we go on, lead me irresistibly to
select the Novel as the particular prose-form for our study.
It happens, indeed, that over and above the purely literary interest
which would easily give this form the first place in such a series as
the present, the question of the Novel has just at this time become
one of the most pressing and vital of all the practical problems
which beset our moral and social economy.
The novel,--what we call the novel--is a new invention. It is
customary to date the first English novel with Richardson in 1740; and
just as it has been impossible to confine other great inventions to
the service of virtue--for the thief can send a telegram to his pal as
easily as the sick man to his doctor, and the locomotive spins along
no less merrily because ten car-loads of rascals may be profiting by
its speed--so vice as well as virtue has availed itself of the
novel-form, and we have such spectacles as Scott, and Dickens, and
Eliot, and Macdonald, using this means to purify the air in one place,
while Zola, in another, applies the very same means to defiling the
whole earth and slandering all humanity under the sacred names of
"naturalism," of "science," of "physiology." Now I need not waste time
in descanting before this audience upon the spread of the novel among
all classes of modern readers: while I have been writing this, a
well-considered paper on "Fiction in our Public Libraries," has
appeared in the current _International Review_, which, among many
suggestive statements, declares that out of pretty nearly five
millions (4,872,595) of volumes circulated in five years by the Boston
Public Library, nearly four millions (3,824,938), that is about
four-fifths, were classed as "Juveniles and Fiction;" and merely
mentioning the strength which these figures gain when considered along
with the fact that they represent the reading of a people supposed to
be more "solid" in literary matter than any other in the country--if
we inquire into the proportion at Baltimore, I fancy I have only to
hold up this copy of James's _The American_, which I borrowed the
other day from the Mercantile Library, and which I think I may say,
after considerable rummaging about the books of that institution,
certainly bears more marks of "circulation" than any solid book in it.
In short, as a people, the novel is educating us. Thus we cannot take
any final or secure solace in the discipline and system of our schools
and universities until we have also learned to regulate this
fascinating universal teacher which has taken such hold upon all
minds, from the gravest scholar down to the boot-black shivering on
the windy street corner over his dime-novel,--this educator whose
principles are fastening themselves upon your boy's mind, so that long
after he has forgotten his _amo_ and his _tupto_, they will be
controlling his relations to his fellow-man, and determining his
happiness for life.
But we can take no really effective action upon this matter until we
understand precisely what the novel is and means; and it is,
therefore, with the additional pleasure of stimulating you to
systematize and extend your views upon a living issue which demands
your opinion, that I now invite you to enter with me, without further
preliminary, upon a series of studies in which it is proposed, first,
to inquire what is that special relation of the novel to the modern
man, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and,
secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some
concrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists.
In the course of this inquiry I shall be called on to bring before you
some of the very largest conceptions of which the mind is capable; and
inasmuch as several of the minor demonstrations will begin somewhat
remotely from the Novel, it will save me many details which would be
otherwise necessary, if I indicate in a dozen words the four special
lines of development along one or other of which I shall be always
travelling.
My first line will concern itself with the enormous growth in the
personality of man which our time reveals when compared, for instance,
with the time of Aeschylus.
I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between every human
being and every other human being exists a radical, unaccountable,
inevitable difference from birth; this sacred Difference between man
and man, by virtue of which I am I, and you are you; this marvellous
separation which we express by the terms "personal identity,"
"self-hood," "me,"--it is the unfolding of this, I shall insist, which
since the time of Aeschylus (say) has wrought all those stupendous
changes in the relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to his
fellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus. I can best bring
upon you the length and breadth of this idea of modern personality as
I conceive it, by stating it in terms which have recently been made
prominent and familiar by the discussion as to the evolution of
genius; a phase of which appears in a very agreeable paper by Mr. John
Fiske in a recent _Atlantic Monthly_ on "Sociology and Hero Worship."
Says Mr. Fiske, in a certain part of this article, "Every species of
animals or plants consists of a great number of individuals which are
nearly, but not exactly alike. Each individual varies slightly in one
characteristic or another from a certain type which expresses the
average among all the individuals of the species.... Now the moth with
his proboscis twice as long as the average ... is what we call a
spontaneous variation; and the Darwin or the Helmholtz is what we call
a 'genius'; and the analogy between the two kinds of variation is
obvious enough." He proceeds in another place: "We cannot tell why a
given moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter in length,
any more than we can tell why Shakspeare was a great dramatist,"
there being absolutely no precedent conditions by which the most
ardent evolutionist could evolve William Shakspeare, for example, from
old John Shakspeare and his wife. "The social philosopher must simply
accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts his spontaneous
variations."
But now if we reflect upon this prodigious series of spontaneous
variations which I have called the sacred difference between man and
man,--this personality which every father and mother are astonished at
anew every day, when out of six children they perceive that each one
of the six, from the very earliest moment of activity, has shown his
own distinct individuality, differing wholly from either parent; the
child who most resembles the parent physically, often having a
personality which crosses that of the parent at the sharpest angles;
this radical, indestructible, universal personality which entitles
every "me" to its privacy, which has in course of time made the
Englishman's house his castle, which has developed the Rights of Man,
the American Republic, the supreme prerogative of the woman to say
whom she will love, what man she shall marry; this personality, so
precious that not even the miserablest wretch with no other possession
_but_ his personality has ever been brought to say he would be willing
to exchange it entire for that of the happiest being; this personality
which has brought about that, whereas in the time of Aeschylus the
common man was simply a creation of the State, like a modern
corporation with rights and powers strictly limited by the State's
charter, now he is a genuine sovereign who makes the State, a king as
to every minutest particle of his individuality so long as that
kinghood does not cross the kinghood of his fellow,--when we reflect
upon _this_ awful spontaneous variation of personality, this "mystery
in us which calls itself _I_" (as Thomas Carlyle has somewhere called
it), which makes every man scientifically a human atom, yet an atom
endowed above all other atoms with the power to choose its own mode of
motion, its own combining equivalent,--when farther we reflect upon
the relation of each human atom to each other human atom, and to the
great Giver of personalities to these atoms,--how each is indissolubly
bound to each, and to Him, and yet how each is discretely parted and
impassably separated from each and from Him by a gulf which is simply
no less deep than the width between the finite and the infinite,--when
we reflect, finally, that it is this simple, indivisible, radical,
indestructible, new force which each child brings into the world under
the name of its _self_; which controls the whole life of that child,
so that its path is always a resultant of its own individual force on
the one hand, and of the force of its surrounding circumstances on the
other,--we are bound to confess, it seems to me, that such spontaneous
variations carry us upon a plane of mystery very far above those
merely unessential variations of the offspring from the parental type
in physique, and even above those rare abnormal variations which we
call genius.
In meditating upon this matter, I found a short time ago a poem of
Tennyson's floating about the newspapers, which so beautifully and
reverently chants this very sense of personality, that I must read you
a line or two from it. I have since observed that much fun has been
made of this piece, and I have seen elaborate burlesques upon it. But
I think such an attitude could be possible only to one who had not
passed along this line of thought. At any rate the poem seemed to me a
very noble and rapturous hymn to the great Personality above us,
acknowledging the mystery of our own personalities as finitely
dependent upon, and yet so infinitely divided from His Personality.
This poem is called _De Profundis--Two Greetings_, and is addressed to
a new-born child. I have time to read only a line or two here and
there; you will find the whole poem much more satisfactory. Please
observe, however, the ample, comforting phrases and summaries with
which Tennyson expresses the poetic idea of that personality which I
have just tried to express from the point of view of science, of the
evolutionist:
Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep,
When all that was to be in all that was
Whirl'd for a million aeons thro' the vast
Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light--
* * * * *
Thro' all this changing world of changeless law.
And every phase of ever-heightening life,
Thou comest.
* * * * *
O, dear Spirit, half-lost
In thine own shadows and this fleshly sign
That thou art thou--who wailest, being born
And banish'd into mystery and the pain
Of this divisible-indivisible world.
* * * * *
Our mortal veil
And shatter'd phantom of that infinite One
Who made thee inconceivably thyself
Out of his whole world--self and all in all--
Live thou, and of the grain and husk, the grape
And ivy berry choose; and still depart
From death to death thro' life and life, and find--
* * * * *
This main miracle, that thou art thou,
With power on thy own act and on the world.
We feel we are nothing--for all is Thou and in Thee;
We feel we are something--that also has come from Thee;
We are nothing, O Thou--but Thou wilt help us to be;
Hallowed be Thy name--Hallelujah!
I find some expressions here which give me great satisfaction: The
Infinite One who made thee inconceivably thyself; this divisible,
indivisible world, this main miracle that thou art thou, etc.
Now it is with this "main miracle," that I am I, and you, you--with
this personality, that my first train of thought will busy itself; and
I shall try to show by several concrete illustrations from the lines
and between the lines of Aeschylus and Plato and the like writers,
compared with several modern writers, how feeble the sense and
influence of it is in their time as contrasted with ours.
In my second line of development, I shall call your attention to what
seems to me a very remarkable and suggestive fact: to-wit, that
Physical Science, Music, and the Novel, all take their rise at the
same time; of course, I mean what we moderns call science, music, and
the novel. For example, if we select, for the sake of well-known
representative names, Sir Isaac Newton (1642), John Sebastian Bach
(1685), and Samuel Richardson (1689), the first standing for the rise
of modern science, the second for the rise of modern music, the third
for the rise of the modern novel, and observe that these three men are
born within fifty years of each other, we cannot fail to find
ourselves in the midst of a thousand surprising suggestions and
inferences. For in our sweeping arc from Aeschylus to the present time,
fifty years subtend scarcely any space; we may say then these men are
born together. And here the word accident has no meaning. Time,
progress, then, have no accident.
Now in this second train of thought I shall endeavor to connect these
phenomena with the principle of personality developed in the first
train, and shall try to show that this science, music, and the novel,
are flowerings-out of that principle in various directions; for
instance, each man in this growth of personality feeling himself in
direct and personal relations with physical nature (not in relations
obscured by the vague intermediary, hamadryads and forms of the Greek
system), a general desire to know the exact truth about nature arises;
and this desire carried to a certain enthusiasm in the nature of given
men--behold the man of science; a similar feeling of direct personal
relation to the Unknown, acting similarly upon particular men,--behold
the musician, and the ever-increasing tendency of the modern to
worship God in terms of music; likewise, a similar feeling of direct
personal relation to each individual member of humanity, high or low,
rich or poor, acting similarly, gives us such a novel as the _Mill on
the Floss_, for instance, when for a long time we find ourselves
interested in two mere children--Tom and Maggie Tulliver--or such
novels as those of Dickens and his fellow-host who have called upon
our human relation to poor, unheroic people.
In my third train of thought, I shall attempt to show that the
increase of personalities thus going on has brought about such
complexities of relation that the older forms of expression were
inadequate to them; and that the resulting necessity has developed the
wonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel out of the more
rigid Greek drama, through the transition form of the Elizabethan
drama.
And, fourthly, I shall offer copious readings from some of the most
characteristic modern novels, in illustration of the general
principles thus brought forward.
Here,--as the old preacher Hugh Latimer grimly said in closing one of
his powerful descriptions of future punishment,--you see your fare.
Permit me, then, to begin the execution of this plan by bringing
before you two matters which will be conveniently disposed of in the
outset, because they affect all these four lines of thought in
general, and because I find the very vaguest ideas prevailing about
them among those whose special attention happens not to have been
called this way.
As to the first point; permit me to remind you how lately these prose
forms have been developed in our literature as compared with the forms
of verse. Indeed, abandoning the thought of any particular forms of
prose, consider for how long a time good English poetry was written
before any good English prose appears. It is historical that as far
back as the seventh century Caedmon is writing a strong English poem in
an elaborate form of verse. Well-founded conjecture carries us back
much farther than this; but without relying upon that, we have clear
knowledge that all along the time when _Beowulf_ and _The
Wanderer_--to me one of the most artistic and affecting of English
poems--and _The Battle of Maldon_ are being written, all along the
time when Caedmon and Aldhelm and the somewhat mythical Cynewulf are
singing, formal poetry or verse has reached a high stage of artistic
development. But not only so; after the Norman change is consummated,
and our language has fairly assimilated that tributary stock of words
and ideas and influences; the _poetic_ advance, the development of
verse, goes steadily on.
If you examine the remains of our lyric poetry written along in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries--short and unstudied little songs as
many of them are, songs which come upon us out of that obscure period
like brief little bird-calls from a thick-leaved wood--if, I say, we
examine these songs, written as many of them are by nobody in
particular, it is impossible not to believe that a great mass of
poetry, some of which must have been very beautiful, was written in
the two hundred years just before Chaucer, and that an extremely small
proportion of it can have come down to us.
But, in all this period, where is the piece of English prose that
corresponds with _The Wanderer_, or with the daintier Cuckoo-Song of
the early twelfth century? In point of fact, we cannot say that even
the conception of an artistic prose has occurred to English literary
endeavor until long after Chaucer. King Alfred's Translations, the
English Chronicle, the Homilies of Aelfric, are simple and clear
enough; and, coming down later, the English Bible set forth by Wyclif
and his contemporaries. Wyclif's sermons and tracts, and Mandeville's
account of his travels are effective enough, each to its own end. But
in all these the form is so far overridden by the direct pressing
purpose, either didactic or educational, that--with exceptions I
cannot now specify in favor of the Wyclif Bible--I can find none of
them in which the prose seems controlled by considerations of beauty.
Perhaps the most curious and interesting proof I could adduce of the
obliviousness of even the most artistic Englishman in this time to the
possibility of a melodious and uncloying English prose, is the prose
work of Chaucer. While, so far as concerns the mere music of verse, I
cannot call Chaucer a great artist, yet he was the greatest of his
time; from him, therefore, we have the right to expect the best
craftsmanship in words; for all fine prose depends as much upon its
rhythms and correlated proportions as fine verse; and, _now_, since we
have an art of prose, it is a perfect test of the real excellence of
a poet in verse to try his corresponding excellence in prose. But in
Chaucer's time there is no art of English prose. Listen, for example,
to the first lines of that one of Chaucer's Canterbury series which he
calls _The Parson's Tale_, and which is in prose throughout. It
happens very pertinently to my present discussion that in the prologue
to this tale some conversation occurs which reveals to us quite
clearly a current idea of Chaucer's time as to the proper distinction
between prose and verse--or "rym"--and as to the functions and
subject-matter peculiarly belonging to each of these forms; and, for
that reason, let me preface my quotation from the _Parson's Tale_ with
a bit of it. As the Canterbury Pilgrims are jogging merrily along,
presently it appears that but one more tale is needed to carry out the
original proposition, and so the ever-important Host calls on the
Parson for it, as follows:
As we were entryng at a thropes ende,
For while our Hoost, as he was wont to gye,
As in this caas, our joly compaignye,
Seyde in this wise: "Lordyngs, everichoon,
Now lakketh us no tales moo than oon," etc.,
and turning to the Parson,
"Sir Prest," quod he, "artow a vicary?
Or arte a persoun? Say soth, by thy fey,
Be what thou be, _ne_ breke _thou_ nat oure pley;
For every man, save thou, hath told his tale.
Unbokele and schew us what is in thy male.
Tel us a fable anoon, for cokkes boones!"
Whereupon the steadfast parson proceeds to assure the company that
whatever he may have in his male [wallet] there is none of your
light-minded and fictitious verse in it; nothing but grave and
reverend prose.
This Persoun him answerede al at oones:
Thou getest fable noon i-told for me.
(And you will presently observe that "fable" in the parson's mind
means very much the same with verse or poetry, and that the whole
business of fiction--that same fiction which has now come to occupy
such a commanding place with us moderns, and which we are to study
with such reverence under its form of the novel--implies downright
lying and wickedness.)
Thou getist fable noon i-told for me;
For Paul, that writeth unto Timothe,
Repreveth hem that weyveth soothfastnesse.
And tellen fables and such wrecchednesse, etc.,
For which I say, if that yow list to heere
Moralite and virtuous mateere,
(That is--as we shall presently see--_prose_).
And thanne that ye will geve me audience,
I wol ful fayne at Cristes reverence,
Do you pleasaunce leful, as I can;
But trusteth wel, I am a Suthern man,
I can nat geste, rum, ram, ruf, by letter,
Ne, God wot, rym hold I but litel better;
And therfor, if yow list, I wol not glose,
I wol yow telle a mery tale in prose.
Here our honest parson, (and he was honest;) I am frightfully tempted
to go clean away from my path and read that heart-filling description
of him which Chaucer gives in the general Prologue to the _Canterbury
Tales_ sweeps away the whole literature of verse and of fiction with
the one contemptuous word "glose"--by which he seems to mean a sort of
shame-faced lying all the more pitiful because done in verse--and sets
up prose as the proper vehicle for "moralite and virtuous mateere."
With this idea of the function of prose, you will not be surprised to
find, as I read these opening sentences of the pastor's so-called
tale, that the style is rigidly sententious, and that the movement of
the whole is like that of a long string of proverbs, which, of course,
presently becomes intolerably droning and wearisome. The parson
begins:
"Many ben the weyes espirituels that leden folk to our Lord Ihesu
Crist, and to the regne of glorie; of whiche weyes ther is a ful noble
wey, which may not faile to no man ne to womman, that thurgh synne
hath mysgon fro the right wey of Jerusalem celestial; and this wey is
cleped penitence. Of which men schulden gladly herken and enquere with
al here herte, to wyte, what is penitence, and whens is cleped
penitence? And in what maner and in how many maneres been the acciones
or workynge of penitence, and how many speces ben of penitence, and
which thinges apperteynen and byhoven to penitence and whiche thinges
destourben penitence."
In reading page after page of this bagpipe-bass, one has to remember
strenuously all the moral beauty of the Parson's character in order to
forgive the droning ugliness of his prose. Nothing could better
realize the description which Tennyson's _Northern Farmer_ gives of
_his_ parson's manner of preaching and the effect thereof:
An' I hallus comed to t' choorch afoor my Sally wur dead,
An' 'eerd un a bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock ower my yead;
An' I niver knaw'd what a meaned, but I thowt a 'ad summut to saay,
An' I thowt a said what a owt to 'a said, an' I comed awaay.
It must be said, however, in justice to Chaucer, that he writes better
prose than this when he really sets about telling a tale. What the
Parson calls his "tale" turns out, to the huge disgust, I suspect, of
several other pilgrims besides the host, to be nothing more than a
homily or sermon, in which the propositions about penitence, with many
minor heads and sub-divisions, are unsparingly developed to the bitter
end. But in the _Tale of Meliboeus_ his inimitable faculty of
story-telling comes to his aid, and determines his sentences to a
little more variety and picturesqueness, though the sententious still
predominates. Here, for example, is a bit of dialogue between
Meliboeus and his wife, which I selected because, over and above its
application here as early prose, we will find it particularly
suggestive presently when we come to compare it with some dialogue in
George Eliot's _Adam Bede_, where the conversation is very much upon
the same topic.
It seems that Meliboeus, being still a young man, goes away into the
fields, leaving his wife Prudence and his daughter--whose name some of
the texts give in its Greek form as Sophia, while others, quaintly
enough, call her Sapience, translating the Greek into Latin--in the
house. Thereupon "three of his olde foos" (says Chaucer) "have it
espyed, and setten laddres to the walles of his hous, and by the
wyndowes ben entred, and beetyn his wyf, and wounded his daughter with
fyve mortal woundes, in fyve sondry places, that is to sayn, in here
feet, in her handes, in here eres, in her nose, and in here mouth; and
lafte her for deed, and went away." Meliboeus assembles a great
counsel of his friends, and these advise him to make war, with an
interminable dull succession of sententious maxims and quotations
which would merely have maddened a modern person to such a degree that
he would have incontinently levied war upon his friends as well as his
enemies. But after awhile Dame Prudence modestly advises against the
war. "This Meliboeus answerde unto his wyf Prudence: 'I purpose
not,' quod he, 'to werke by this counseil, for many causes and
resouns; for certes every wight wolde holde me thanne a fool, this is
to sayn, if I for thy counseil wolde chaunge things that affirmed ben
by somany wise.
Secondly, I say that alle wommen be wikked, and noon good of hem alle.
For of a thousand men, saith Solomon, I find oon good man; but certes
of alle wommen good womman find I never noon. And also certes, if I
governede am by thy counseil, it schulde seme that I hadde given to
the over me the maistry; and God forbid er it so were. For Ihesus
Syrac saith,'" etc., etc. You observe here, although this is dialogue
between man and wife, the prose nevertheless tends to the sententious,
and every remark must be supported with some dry old maxim or
epigrammatic saw. Observe too, by the way,--and we shall find this
point most suggestive in studying the modern dialogue in George
Eliot's novels, etc.,--that there is absolutely no individuality or
personality in the talk; Meliboeus drones along exactly as his
friends do, and his wife quotes old authoritative saws, just as he
does. But Dame Prudence replies,--and all those who are acquainted
with the pungent Mrs. Poyser in George Eliot's _Adam Bede_ will
congratulate Meliboeus that his foregoing sentiments concerning
woman were uttered five hundred years before that lady's tongue began
to wag,--"When Dame Prudence, ful debonerly and with gret pacience,
hadde herd al that her housbande liked for to saye, thanne axede sche
of him license for to speke, and sayde in this wise: 'My Lord,' quod
sche, 'as to your firste resoun, certes it may lightly be answered;
for I say it is no foly to chaunge counsel when the thing is
chaungid, or elles when the thing semeth otherwise than it was
bifoore.'" This very wise position she supports with argument and
authority, and then goes on boldly to attack not exactly Solomon's
wisdom, but the number of data from which he drew it. "'And though
that Solomon say _he_ fond never good womman, it folwith nought
therfore that alle wommen ben wicked; for though that he fonde noone
goode wommen, certes many another man hath founden many a womman ful
goode and trewe.'" (Insinuating, what is doubtless true, that the
finding of a good woman depends largely on the kind of man who is
looking for her.)
After many other quite logical replies to all of Meliboeus'
positions, Dame Prudence closes with the following argument: "And
moreover, whan oure Lord hadde creat Adam oure forme fader, he sayde
in this wise, Hit is not goode to be a man alone; makes we to him an
help semblable to himself. Here may ye se that, if that a womman were
not good, and hir counseil good and profytable, oure Lord God of heven
would neither have wrought hem, ne called hem help of man, but rather
confusion of man. And ther sayde oones a clerk in two versus, What is
better than gold? Jasper. And what is better than jasper? Wisdom. And
what is better than wisdom? Womman. And what is better than a good
womman? No thing."
When we presently come to contrast this little scene between man and
wife in what may fairly be called the nearest approach to the modern
novel that can be found before the fifteenth century, we shall find a
surprising number of particulars, besides the unmusical tendency to
run into the sententious or proverbial form, in which the modern mode
of thought differs from that of the old writers from whom Chaucer got
his Meliboeus.
This sententious monotune (if I may coin a word) of the prose, when
falling upon a modern ear, gives almost a comical tang, even to the
gravest utterances of the period. For example, here are the opening
lines of a fragment of prose from a MS. in the Cambridge University
Library, reprinted by the early English Text Society in the issue for
1870. It is good, pithy reading, too. It is called "The Six Wise
Masters' Speech of Tribulation."
Observe that the first sentence, though purely in the way of
narrative, is just as sententious in form as the graver proverbs of
each master that follow.
It begins:
Here begynyth A shorte extracte, and tellyth how par ware sex
masterys assemblede, ande eche one askede oper quhat thing pai
sholde spek of gode, and all pei war acordet to spek of
tribulacoun.
The fyrste master seyde, pat if ony thing hade bene mor better to
ony man lewynge in this werlde pan tribulacoun, god wald haue
gewyne it to his sone. But he sey wyell that thar was no better,
and tharfor he gawe it hum, and mayde hume to soffer moste in
this wrechede worlde than euer dyde ony man, or euermore shall.
The secunde master seyde, pat if par wer ony man pat mycht be
wyth-out spote of sine, as god was, and mycht levyn bodely pirty
yheris wyth-out mete, ande also were dewote in preyinge pat he
mycht speke wyth angele in pe erth, as dyde mary magdalene, yit
mycht he not deserve in pat lyffe so gret meyde as A man
deservith in suffring of A lytyll tribulacoun.
The threde master seyde, pat if the moder of gode and all the
halowys of hewyn preyd for a man, pei should not get so gret
meyde as he should hymselfe be meknes and suffryng of
tribulacoun.
Now asking you, as I pass, to remember that I have selected this
extract, like the others, with the further purpose of presently
contrasting the _substance_ of it with modern utterances, as well as
the _form_ which we are now mainly concerned--if we cut short this
search after artistic prose in our earlier literature, and come down
at once to the very earliest sign of a true feeling for the musical
movement of prose sentences, we are met by the fact, which I hope to
show is full of fruitful suggestions upon our present studies, that
the art of English prose is at least eight hundred years younger than
the art of English verse. For, in coming down our literature from
Caedmon--whom, in some conflict of dates, we can safely place at
670--the very first writer I find who shows a sense of the rhythmical
flow and gracious music of which our prose is so richly capable, is
Sir Thomas Malory; and his one work, _The History of King Arthur and
His Knights of the Round Table_, dates 1469-70, exactly eight hundred
years after Caedmon's poetic outburst.
Recalling our extracts just read, and remembering how ungainly and
awkward was the sport of their sentences, listen for a moment to a few
lines from Sir Thomas Malory. I think the most unmusical ear, the most
cursory attention, cannot fail to discern immediately how much more
flowing and smooth is the movement of this. I read from the fifth
chapter of King Arthur.
"And King Arthur was passing wrath for the hurt of Sir Griflet.
And by and by he commanded a man of his chamber that his best
horse and armor be without the city on to-morrow-day. Right so in
the morning he met with his man and his horse, and so mounted up
and dressed his shield, and took his spear, and bade his
chamberlain tarry there till he came again." Presently he meets
Merlin and they go on together.
"So as they went thus talking, they came to the fountain and the
rich pavilion by it. Then King Arthur was ware where a knight sat
all armed in a chair. 'Sir Knight,' said King Arthur, 'for what
cause abidest thou here? that there may no knight ride this way
but if he do joust with thee?' said the King. 'I rede thee leave
that custom,' said King Arthur.
'This custom,' said the knight, 'have I used and will use, maugre
who saith nay; and who is grieved with my custom, let him amend
it that will.'
'I will amend it,' said King Arthur, 'And I shall defend it,'
said the knight." (Observe _will_ and _shall_ here).
Here, you observe not only is there musical flow of single sentences,
but one sentence remembers another and proportions itself thereto--if
the last was long, this, is shorter or longer, and if one calls for a
certain tune, the most calls for a different tune--and we have not
only grace but variety. In this variety may be found an easy test of
artistic prose. If you try to read two hundred lines of Chaucer's
_Meliboeus_ or his _Parson's Tale_ aloud, you are presently
oppressed with a sense of bagpipishness in your own voice which
becomes intolerable; but you can read Malory's _King Arthur_ aloud
from beginning to end with a never-cloying sense of proportion and
rhythmic flow.
I wish I had time to demonstrate minutely how much of the relish of
all fine prose is due to the arrangement of the sentences in such a
way that consecutive sentences do not call for the same tune; for
example, if one sentence is sharp antithesis--you know the well-marked
speech tune of an antithesis, "do you mean _this_ book, or do you mean
_that_ book?" you must be careful in the next sentence to vary the
tune from that of the antithesis.
In the prose I read you from Chaucer and from the old manuscript, a
large part of the intolerableness is due to the fact that nearly every
sentence involves the tune of an aphorism or proverb, and the
iteration of the same pitch-successions in the voice presently becomes
wearisome. This fault--of the succession of antithetic ideas so that
the voice becomes weary of repeating the same contrariety of
accents--I can illustrate very strikingly in a letter which I happen
to remember of Queen Elizabeth, whom I have found to be a great sinner
against good prose in this particular.
Here is part of a letter from her to King Edward VI. concerning a
portrait of herself which it seems the king had desired. (Italicised
words represent antithetic accents.)
"Like as the rich man that daily gathereth _riches_ to _riches_,
and to _one_ bag of money layeth a great sort till it come to
_infinite_; so methinks your majesty, not being sufficed with so
many benefits and gentleness shewed to me afore this time, doth
now increase them in _asking_ and _desiring_ where you may _bid_
and _command_, requiring a thing not worthy the desiring for
_itself_, but _made_ worthy for your highness' _request_. My
picture I mean; in which, if the _inward_ good mind toward your
grace might as well be _declared_, as the _outward_ face and
countenance shall be _seen_, I would not have _tarried_ the
commandment but _prevented_ it, nor have been the _last_ to
_grant_, but the _first_ to _offer_ it."
And so on. You observe here into what a sing-song the voice must fall;
if you abstract the words, and say over the tune, it is continually;
tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty, tum-ty-ty tum-ty-ty.
I wish also that it lay within my province to pass on and show the
gradual development of English prose, through Sir Thomas More, Lord
Berners, and Roger Ascham, whom we may assign to the earlier half of
the 16th Century, until it reaches a great and beautiful artistic
stage in the prose of Fuller, of Hooker, and of Jeremy Taylor.
But the fact which I propose to use as throwing light on the novel, is
simply the lateness of English prose as compared with English verse;
and we have already sufficiently seen that the rise of our prose must
be dated at least eight centuries after that of our formal poetry.
But having established the fact that English prose is so much later in
development than English verse, the point that I wish to make in this
connection now requires me to go and ask the question why is this so.
Without the time to adduce supporting facts from other literature, and
indeed wholly unable to go into elaborate proof, let me say at once
that upon examining the matter it seems probable that the whole
earlier speech of man must have been rhythmical, and that in point of
fact we began with verse which is much simpler in rhythm than any
prose; and that we departed from this regular rhythmic utterance into
more and more complex utterance just according as the advance of
complexity in language and feeling required the freer forms of prose.
To adduce a single consideration leading toward this view: reflect for
a moment that the very breath of every man necessarily divides off his
words into rhythmic periods; the average rate of a man's breath being
17 to 20 respirations in a minute. Taking the faster rate as the more
probable one in speaking, the man would, from the periodic necessity
of refilling the lungs, divide his words into twenty groups, equal in
time, every minute, and if these syllables were equally pronounced at,
say, about the rate of 200 a minute, we should have ten syllables in
each group, each ten syllables occupying (in the aggregate at least)
the same time with any other ten syllables, that is, the time of our
breath.
But this is just the rhythm of our English blank verse, in essential
type; ten syllables to the line or group; and our primitive talker is
speaking in the true English heroic rhythm. Thus it may be that our
dear friend M. Jourdain was not so far wrong after all in his
astonishment at finding that he had been speaking prose all his life.
II.
Perhaps I ought here carefully to state that in propounding the idea
that the whole common speech of early man may have been rhythmical
through the operation of uniformity of syllables and periodicity of
breath, and that for this reason prose, which is practically verse of
a very complex rhythm, was naturally a later development; in
propounding this idea, I say, I do not mean to declare that the
prehistoric man, after a hard day's work on a flint arrow-head at his
stone-quarry would dance back to his dwelling in the most beautiful
rhythmic figures, would lay down his palaeolithic axe to a slow song,
and, striking an operatic attitude, would call out to his wife to
leave off fishing in the stream and bring him a stone mug of water,
all in a most sublime and impassioned flight of poetry. What I do mean
to say is that if the prehistoric man's syllables were uniform, and
his breath periodic, then the rhythmical results described would
follow. Here let me at once illustrate this, and advance a step
towards my final point in this connection, by reminding you how easily
the most commonplace utterances in modern English, particularly when
couched mainly in words of one syllable, fall into quite respectable
verse rhythms. I might illustrate this, but Dr. Samuel Johnson has
already done it for me:--"I put my hat upon my head and walked into
the Strand, and there I met another man whose hat was in his hand." We
have only to arrange this in proper form in order to see that it is a
stanza of verse quite perfect as to all technical requirement:--
"I put my hat upon my head,
And walked into the Strand,
And there I met another man,
Whose hat was in his hand."
Now let me ask you to observe precisely what happens, when by adding
words here and there in this verse we more and more obscure its verse
form and bring out its prose form. Suppose, for example, we here write
"hastily," and here "rushed forth," and here "encountered," and here
"hanging," so as to make it read:
"I hastily put my hat upon my head,
And rushed forth into the Strand,
And there I encountered another man,
Whose hat was hanging in his hand."
Here we have made unmitigated prose, but how? Remembering that
original verse was in iambic 4's and 3's,
___ ___ __ ____
I put | my hat | up-on | my head |[**Diacritical marks]
--by putting in the word "hastily" in the first line, we have not
_destroyed_ the rhythm; we still have the rhythmic sequence, "my hat upon
my head," unchanged; but we have merely _added_ brief rhythms, namely that
of the word "hastily," which we may call a modern or logaoedic dactyl
(hastily)[**Symbols above hastily]; that is to say, instead now of leaving
our first line _all_ iambic, we have varied that rhythmus with another; and
in so doing have converted our verse into prose. Similarly, in the second
line, "rushed forth," which an English tongue would here deliver as a
spondee--rushed forth--_varies_ the rhythm by this spondaic intervention,
but still leaves us the original rhythmic cluster, "into the Strand." So,
of the other introduced words, "encountered" and "hanging," each has its
own rhythm--for an English tongue always gives these words with definite
time-relations between the syllables, that is, in rhythm. Therefore, in
order to make prose out of this verse, we have not destroyed the rhythms,
we have added to them. We have not made it _formless_, we have made it
contain _more forms_.
Now, in this analysis, which I have tried to bring to its very
simplest terms, I have presented what seems to me the true genesis of
prose; and have set up a distinction, which, though it may appear
abstract and insignificant at present, we shall presently see lies at
the bottom of some most remarkable and pernicious fallacies concerning
literature. That distinction is, that the relation of prose to verse
is _not_ the relation of the _formless_ to the _formal_: it is the
relation of _more forms_ to _fewer forms_. It is this relation which
makes prose a _freer_ form than verse.
When we are writing in verse, if we have the line with an iambus (say)
then our next words or syllables must make an iambus, and we are
confined to that form; but if in prose, our next word need not be an
iambus because the first was, but may be any one of several possible
rhythmic forms; thus, while in verse we _must_ use _one_ form, in
prose we _may_ use _many_ forms; and just to the extent of these
possible forms is prose freer than verse. We shall find occasion
presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, _not_ because
prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given
sequence of prose has _more forms_ in it than a sequence of verse.
Here, reserving to a later place the special application of all this
to the novel, I have brought my first general point to a stage where
it constitutes the basis of the second one. You have already heard
much of "forms"--of the verse-form, the prose-form, of form in art,
and the like. Now, in the course of a considerable experience in what
Shakspeare sadly calls "public means," I have found no matter upon
which wider or more harmful misconceptions exist among people of
culture, and particularly among us Americans, than this matter of the
true functions of forms in art, of the true relation of science--which
we may call the knowledge of forms--to art, and most especially of
these functions and relations in literary art. These misconceptions
have flowered out into widely different shapes.
In one direction, for example, we find a large number of timorous
souls, who believe that science, in explaining everything as they
singularly fancy, will destroy the possibility of poetry, of the
novel, in short of all works of the imagination; the idea seeming to
be that the imagination always requires the hall of life to be
darkened before it displays its magic, like the modern spiritualistic
seance-givers who can do nothing with the rope-tying and the guitars
unless the lights are put out.
Another form of the same misconception goes precisely to the opposite
extreme, and declares that the advance of science with its incidents
is going to give a great new revolutionized democratic literature,
which will wear a slouch hat and have its shirt open at the bosom, and
generally riot in a complete independence of form.
And finally--to mention no more than a third phase--we may consider
the original misconception to have reached a climax which is at once
absurd and infernal, in a professedly philosophical work called _Le
Roman Experimentale_, recently published by M. Emile Zola, gravely
defending his peculiar novels as the records of scientific
experiments, and declaring that the whole field of imaginative effort
must follow his lead.
Now, if any of these beliefs are true, we are wickedly wasting our
time here in studying the novel--at least any other novels except M.
Zola's, and we ought to look to ourselves. Seriously, I do not believe
I could render you a greater service than by here arraying such
contribution as I can make towards some firm, clear and pious
conceptions as to this matter of form, of science, in art, before
briefly considering these three concrete errors I have enumerated--to
wit, the belief (1) that science will destroy all poetry, all
novel-writing and all imaginative work generally; (2) that science
will simply destroy the _old_ imaginative products and build up a new
formless sort of imaginative product in its stead; and (3) that
science will absorb into _itself_ all imaginative effort, so that
every novel will be merely the plain, unvarnished record of a
scientific experiment in passion. Let me submit two or three
principles whose steady light will leave, it seems to me, but little
space for perplexity as to these diverse claims.
Start, then, in the first place, with a definite recalling to yourself
of the province of form throughout our whole daily life. Here we find
a striking consensus, at least in spirit, between the deliverances of
the sternest science and of the straitest orthodoxy. The latter, on
the one hand, tells us that in the beginning the earth was without
form and void; and it is only after the earth is formulated--after the
various forms of the lights, of land and water, bird, fish and man
appear--it is only then that life and use and art and relation and
religion become possible. What we call the creation, therefore, is not
the making something out of nothing, but it is the giving of _form_ to
a something which, though existing, existed to no purpose because it
had no form.
On the other hand, the widest generalizations of science bring us
practically to the same view. Science would seem fairly to have
reduced all this host of phenomena which we call the world into a
congeries of motions in many forms. What we know by our senses is
simply such forms of these motions as our senses have a correlated
capacity for. The atoms of this substance, moving in orbits too narrow
for human vision, impress my sense with a certain property which I
call hardness or resistance, this "hardness" being simply our name for
one form of atom-motion when impressing itself on the human sense. So
color, shape, &c.; these are our names representing a correlation
between certain other forms of motion and our senses. Regarding the
whole universe thus as a great congeries of forms of motion, we may
now go farther and make for ourselves a scientific and useful
generalization, reducing a great number of facts to a convenient
common denominator, by considering that Science is the knowledge of
these forms; that Art is the creation of beautiful forms; that
Religion is the faith in the infinite Form-giver and in that infinity
of forms which many things lead us to believe as existing, but
existing beyond any present correlative capacities of our senses; and
finally that Life is the control of all these forms to the
satisfaction of our human needs.
And now advancing a step: when we remember how all accounts, the
scientific, the religious, the historical, agree that the progress of
things is _from_ chaos or formlessness _to_ form, and, as we saw in
the case of verse and prose, afterwards from the one-formed to the
many-formed, we are not disturbed by any shouts, however stentorian,
of a progress that professes to be winning freedom by substituting
formlessness for form; we know that the ages are rolling the other
way,--who shall stop those wheels? We know that what they really do
who profess to substitute formlessness for form is to substitute a
bad form for a good one, or an ugly form for a beautiful one. Do not
dream of getting rid of form; your most cutting stroke at it but gives
us two forms for one. For, in a sense which adds additional reverence
to the original meaning of those words, we may devoutly say that in
form we live and move and have our being. How strange, then, the
furtive apprehension of danger lying behind too much knowledge of
form, too much technic, which one is amazed to find prevailing so
greatly in our own country.
But, advancing a further step from the particular consideration of
science as the knowledge of forms, let us come to the fact that as all
art is a congeries of forms, each art must have its own peculiar
science; and always we have, in a true sense, the art of an art and
the science of that art. For example, correlative to the art of music,
we have the general science of music, which indeed consists of several
quite separate sciences. If a man desire to become a musical composer,
he is absolutely obliged to learn (1) the science of Musical Form, (2)
the science of Harmony, and (3) the science of Orchestration or
Instrumentation.
The science of musical form, concerns this sort of matter, for
instance. A symphony has generally four great divisions, called
movements, separated usually from each other by a considerable pause.
Each of these movements has a law of formation: it consists of two
main subjects, or melodies, and a modulation-part. The sequence of
these subjects, the method of varying them by causing now one and now
another of the instruments to come forward and play the subject in
hand while subordinate parts are assigned to the others, the interplay
of the two subjects in the modulation-part,--all this is the
subject-matter of a science which every composer must laboriously
learn.
But again: he must learn the great science of harmony, and of that
wonderful tonality which has caused our music to be practically a
different art from what preceding ages called music; this science of
harmony having its own body of classifications and formulated laws
just as the science of Geology has, and a voluminous literature of its
own. Again, he must painfully learn the range and capacities of each
orchestral instrument, lest he write passages for the violin which no
violin can play, &c., and further, the particular ideas which seem to
associate themselves with the tone-color of each instrument, as the
idea of women's voices with the clarionet, the idea of tenderness and
childlikeness with the oboe, &c. This is not all; the musical composer
may indeed write a symphony if he has these three sciences of music
well in hand; but a fourth science of music, namely, the physics of
music, or musical acoustics, has now grown to such an extent that
every composer will find himself lame without a knowledge of it.
And so the art of painting has its correlative science of painting,
involving laws of optics, and of form; the art of sculpture, its
correlative science of sculpture, involving the science of human
anatomy, &c.; and each one of the literary arts has its correlative
science--the art of verse its science of verse, the art of prose its
science of prose. Lastly, we all know that no amount of genius will
supply the lack of science in art. Phidias may be all afire with the
conception of Jove, but unless he is a scientific man to the extent of
a knowledge of anatomy, he is no better artist than Strephon who
cannot mould the handle of a goblet. What is Beethoven's genius until
Beethoven has become a scientific man to the extent of knowing the
sciences of Musical Form, of Orchestration, and of Harmony?
But now if I go on and ask what would be the worth of Shakspeare's
genius unless he were a scientific man to the extent of knowing the
science of English verse, or what would be George Eliot's genius
unless she knew the science of English prose or the science of
novel-writing, a sort of doubtful stir arises, and it would seem as if
a suspicion of some vague esoteric difference between the relation of
the literary arts to their correlative sciences and the relation of
other arts to _their_ correlative sciences influenced the general
mind.
I am so unwilling you should think me here fighting a mere man of
straw who has been arranged with a view to the convenience of knocking
him down, and I find such mournful evidences of the complete
misconception of form, of literary science in our literature, that,
with a reluctance which every one will understand, I am going to draw
upon a personal experience, to show the extent of that misconception.
Some of you may remember that a part of the course of lectures which
your present lecturer delivered here last year were afterwards
published in book-form, under the title of _The Science of English
Verse_. Happening in the publisher's office some time afterwards, I
was asked if I would care to see the newspaper notices and criticisms
of the book, whereof the publishers had collected a great bundle. Most
curious to see if some previous ideas I had formed as to the general
relation between literary art and science would be confirmed, I read
these notices with great interest. Not only were my suspicions
confirmed: but it is perfectly fair to say that nine out of ten, even
of those which most generously treated the book in hand, treated it
upon the general theory that a work on the science of verse must
necessarily be a collection of rules for making verses. Now, not one
of these writers would have treated a work on the science of geology
as a collection of rules for making rocks; or a work on the science of
anatomy as a collection of rules for making bones or for procuring
cadavers. In point of fact, a book of rules for making verses might
very well be written; but then it would be a hand-book of the art of
verse, and would take the whole science of verse for granted,--like an
instruction-book for the piano, or the like.
If we should find the whole critical body of a continent treating
(say) Prof. Huxley's late work on the crayfish as really a
cookery-book, intended to spread intelligent ideas upon the best
methods of preparing shell-fish for the table, we should certainly
suspect something wrong; but this is precisely parallel with the
mistake already mentioned.
But even when the functions of form, of science, in literary art have
been comprehended, one is amazed to find among literary artists
themselves a certain apprehension of danger in knowing too much of the
forms of art. A valued friend who has won a considerable place in
contemporary authorship in writing me not long ago said, after much
abstract and impersonal admission of a possible science of verse--in
the way that one admits there may be griffins, but feels no great
concern about it--"_as for me I would rather continue to write verse
from pure instinct_."
This fallacy--of supposing that we do a thing by instinct simply because we
_learned_ to do it unsystematically and without formal teaching--seems a
curious enough climax to the misconceptions of literary science. You have
only to reflect a moment in order to see that not a single line of verse
was ever written by instinct alone since the world began. For--to go no
farther--the most poetically instinctive child is obliged at least to learn
the science of language--the practical relation of noun and verb and
connective--before the crudest line of verse can be written; and since no
child talks by instinct, since every child has to learn from others every
word it uses,--with an amount of diligence and of study which is really
stupendous when we think of it--what wild absurdity to forget these years
passed by the child in learning even the rudiments of the science of
language which must be well in hand, mind you, before even the rudiments of
the science of verse can be learned--what wild absurdity to fancy that one
is writing verse by instinct when even the language of verse, far from
being instinctive, had to be painfully, if unsystematically, learned as a
science.
Once, for all, remembering the dignity of form as we have traced it,
remembering the relations of Science as the knowledge of forms, of Art
as the creator of beautiful forms, of Religion as the aspiration
towards unknown forms and the unknown Form-giver, let us abandon this
unworthy attitude towards form, towards science, towards technic, in
literary art, which has so long sapped our literary endeavor.
The writer of verse is afraid of having too much form, of having too
much technic; he dreads it will interfere with his spontaneity.
No more decisive confession of weakness can be made. It is only
cleverness and small talent which is afraid of its spontaneity; the
genius, the great artist, is forever ravenous after new forms, after
technic; he will follow you to the ends of the earth if you will
enlarge his artistic science, if you will give him a fresh form. For
indeed genius, the great artist, never works in the frantic vein
vulgarly supposed; a large part of the work of the poet, for example,
is reflective; a dozen ideas in a dozen forms throng to his brain at
once; he must choose the best; even in the extremest heat and
sublimity of his raptus, he must preserve a god-like calm, and order
thus and so, and keep the rule so that he shall to the end be master
of his art and not be mastered by his art.
Charlotte Cushman used often to tell me that when she was, as the
phrase is, carried out of herself, she never acted well: she must have
her inspiration, she must be in a true _raptus_, but the _raptus_ must
be well in hand, and she must retain the consciousness, at once
sublime and practical, of every act.
There is an old aphorism--it is twelve hundred years old--which covers
all this ground of the importance of technic, of science, in the
literary art, with such completeness and compactness that it always
affects one like a poem. It was uttered, indeed, by a poet--and a rare
one he must have been--an old Armorican named Herve, of whom all
manner of beautiful stories have survived. This aphorism is, "He who
will not answer to the rudder, must answer to the rocks." If any of
you have read that wonderful description of shipwreck on these same
Armorican rocks which occurs in the autobiography of Millet, the
painter, and which was recently quoted in a number of _Scribner's
Magazine_, you can realize that one who lived in that old
Armorica--the modern Brittany from which Millet comes--knew full well
what it meant to answer to the rocks.
Now, it is precisely this form, this science, this technic, which is
the rudder of the literary artist, whether he work at verse or novels.
I wish it were everywhere written, even in the souls of all our young
American writers, that he who will not answer to the rudder shall
answer to the rocks. This was the belief of the greatest literary
artist our language has ever produced.
We have direct contemporary testimony that Shakspeare was supremely
solicitous in this matter of form. Ben Jonson, in that hearty
testimonial, "To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr. William
Shakspeare, and What He Hath Left Us," which was prefixed to the
edition of 1623, says, after praises which are lavish even for an
Elizabethan eulogy:
Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
(Meaning here thy technic, thy care of form, thy science),
My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part;
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same
(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,
_For a good poet's made as well as born,
And such wert thou._ Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race.
Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines
_In his well-turned and true-filed lines,
In each of which he seems to shake a lance_,
As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.
No fear with Shakspeare of damaging his spontaneity; he shakes a lance
at the eyes of Ignorance in every line.
With these views of the progress of forms in general, of the relations
of Science--or the _knowledge_ of all forms--to Art, or the creation
of beautiful forms, we are prepared, I think, to maintain much
equilibrium in the midst of the discordant cries, already mentioned,
(1) of those who believe that Science will destroy all literary art;
(2) of those who believe that art is to advance by becoming democratic
and formless; (3) and lastly, of those who think that the future
novelist is to enter the service of science as a police-reporter in
ordinary for the information of current sociology.
Let us, therefore, inquire if it is really true--as I am told is much
believed in Germany, and as I have seen not unfrequently hinted in the
way of timorous apprehension in our own country--that science is to
abolish the poet and the novel-writer and all imaginative literature.
It is surprising that in all the discussions upon this subject the
matter has been treated as belonging solely to the future. But surely
life is too short for the folly of arguing from prophecy when we can
argue from history; and it seems to me this question is determined. As
matter of fact, science (to confine our view to English science) has
been already advancing with prodigious strides for two hundred and
fifty years, and side by side with it English poetry has been
advancing for the same period. Surely, whatever effect science has
upon poetry can be traced during this long companionship. While Hooke
and Wilkins and Newton and Horrox and the Herschels and Franklin and
Davy and Faraday and the Darwins and Dalton and Huxley and many more
have been penetrating into physical nature, Dryden, Pope, Byron,
Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Longfellow, have been singing;
while gravitation, oxygen, electro-magnetism, the atomic theory, the
spectroscope, the siren, are being evolved, the _Ode to St. Cecilia_,
the _Essay on Man_, _Manfred_, _A man's a man for a' that_, the _Ode
on Immortality_, _In Memoriam_, the _Ode to a Nightingale_, _The Psalm
of Life_, are being written. If indeed we go over into Germany, there
is Goethe, at once pursuing science and poetry.
Now, if we examine the course and progress of this poetry, born thus
within the very grasp and maw of this terrible science, it seems to me
that we find--as to the _substance_ of poetry--a steadily increasing
confidence and joy in the mission of the poet, in the sacredness of
faith and love and duty and friendship and marriage, and in the
sovereign fact of man's personality; while as to the _form_ of the
poetry, we find that just as science has pruned our faith (to make it
more faithful), so it has pruned our poetic form and technic, cutting
away much unproductive wood and efflorescence and creating finer
reserves and richer yields. Since it would be simply impossible, in
the space of these lectures, to illustrate this by any detailed view
of all the poets mentioned, let us confine ourselves to one, Alfred
Tennyson, and let us inquire how it fares with him. Certainly no more
favorable selection could be made for those who believe in the
destructiveness of science. Here is a man born in the midst of
scientific activity, brought up and intimate with the freest thinkers
of his time, himself a notable scientific pursuer of botany, and
saturated by his reading with all the scientific conceptions of his
age. If science is to sweep away the silliness of faith and love, to
destroy the whole field of the imagination and make poetry folly, it
is a miracle if Tennyson escape. But if we look into his own words,
this miracle beautifully transacts itself before our eyes. Suppose we
inquire, Has science cooled this poet's love? We are answered in No.
60 of _In Memoriam_:
If in thy second state sublime,
Thy ransomed reason change replies
With all the circle of the wise,
The perfect flower of human time;
And if thou cast thine eyes below,
How dimly character'd and slight,
How dwarf'd a growth of cold and night,
How blanch'd with darkness must I grow!
Yet turn thee to the doubtful shore,
Where thy first form was made a man,
I loved thee, Spirit, and love, nor can
The soul of Shakspeare love thee more.
Here is precisely the same loving gospel that Shakspeare himself used
to preach, in that series of Sonnets which we may call _his_ In
Memoriam to his friend; the same loving tenacity, unchanged by three
hundred years of science. It is interesting to compare this No. 60 of
Tennyson's poem with Sonnet 32 of Shakspeare's series, and note how
both preach the supremacy of love over style or fashion.
If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more re-survey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time;
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
"Had my friend's muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had bought,
To march in ranks of better equipage;
But since he died, and poets better prove,
Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his love."
Returning to Tennyson: has science cooled his yearning for human
friendship? We are answered in No. 90 of _In Memoriam_. Where was ever
such an invocation to a dead friend to return!
When rosy plumelets tuft the larch,
And rarely pipes the mounted thrush;
Or underneath the barren bush
Flits by the sea-blue bird of March;
Come, wear the form by which I know
Thy spirit in time among thy peers;
The hope of unaccomplish'd years
Be large and lucid round thy brow.
When summer's hourly mellowing change
May breathe, with many roses sweet,
Upon the thousand waves of wheat,
That ripple round the lonely grange;
Come; not in watches of the night,
But where the sunbeam broodeth warm,
Come, beauteous in thine after-form,
And like a finer light in light.
Or still more touchingly, in No. 49, for here he writes from the
depths of a sick despondency, from all the darkness of a bad quarter
of an hour.
Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is racked with pains that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a fury, slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing,
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
Has it diminished his tender care for the weakness of others? We are
wonderfully answered in No. 33.
O thou that after toil and storm
Mayst seem to have reach'd a purer air,
Whose faith has centre everywhere,
Nor cares to fix itself to form.
Leave thou thy sister when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor then with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
Her faith thro' form is pure as thine,
Her hands are quicker unto good.
Oh, sacred be the flesh and blood
To which she links a truth divine!
See thou, that countest reason ripe
In holding by the law within,
Thou fail not in a world of sin,
And ev'n for want of such a type.
Has it crushed out his pure sense of poetic beauty? Here in No. 84 we
have a poem which, for what I can only call absolute beauty, is simply
perfect.
Sweet after showers, ambrosial air,
That rollest from the gorgeous gloom
Of evening over brake and bloom
And meadow, slowly breathing bare
The round of space, and rapt below
Thro' all the dewy-tassell'd wood,
And shadowing down the horned flood
In ripples, fan my brows, and blow
The fever from my cheek, and sigh
The full new life that feeds thy breath
Throughout my frame, till Doubt and Death
Ill brethren, let the fancy fly
From belt to belt of crimson seas
On leagues of odor streaming far
To where in yonder orient star
A hundred spirits whisper 'Peace.'
And finally we are able to see from his own words that he is not
ignorantly resisting the influences of science, but that he knows
science, reveres it and understands its precise place and function.
What he terms in the following poem (113 of _In Memoriam_) _Knowledge_
and _Wisdom_ are what we have been speaking of as Science and Poetry.
Who loves not Knowledge? Who shall rail
Against her beauty? May she mix
With men and prosper! Who shall fix
Her pillars? Let her work prevail.
* * * * *
Let her know her place;
She is the second, not the first.
A higher hand must make her mild,
If all be not in vain; and guide
Her footsteps, moving side by side
With wisdom, like the younger child:
For she is earthly of the mind,
But Wisdom heavenly of the Soul.
O friend, who camest to thy goal
So early, leaving me behind,
I would the great world grew like thee
Who grewest not alone in power
And knowledge, but by year and hour
In reverence and in charity.
If then, regarding Tennyson as fairly a representative victim of
Science, we find him still preaching the poet's gospel of beauty, as
comprehending the evangel of faith, hope and charity, only preaching
it in those newer and finer forms with which science itself has
endowed him; if we find his poetry just so much stronger and richer
and riper by as much as he has been trained and beaten and disciplined
with the stern questions which scientific speculation has
put--questions which you will find presented in their most sombre
terribleness in Tennyson's _Two Voices_; if finally we find him
steadily regarding science as _knowledge_ which only the true poet can
vivify into _wisdom_:--then I say, life is too short to waste any of
it in listening to those who, in the face of this history, still
prophesy that Science is to destroy Poetry.
Nothing, indeed, would be easier than to answer all this argument upon
_a priori_ grounds: this argument is, in brief, that wonder and
mystery are the imagination's _material_, and that science is to
explain away all mystery. But what a crude view is this of
explanation! The moment you examine the process, you find that at
bottom explanation is simply the reduction of unfamiliar mysteries to
terms of familiar mysteries. For simplest example: here is a mass of
conglomerate: science explains that it is composed of a great number
of pebbles which have become fastened together by a natural cement.
But after all, is not one pebble as great a mystery as a mountain of
conglomerate? though we are familiar with the pebble, and unfamiliar
with the other. Now to the wise man, the poet, familiarity with a
mystery brings no contempt; to explanation of science, supremely
fascinating as it is, but opens up a new world of wonders, but adds to
old mysteries. Indeed, the wise searcher into nature always finds, as
a poet has declared, that
... "In seeking to undo
One riddle, and to find the true
I knit a hundred others new."
And so, away with this folly. Science, instead of being the enemy of
poetry, is its quartermaster and commissary--it forever purveys for
poetry, and just so much more as it shall bring man into contact with
nature, just so much more large and intense and rich will be the
poetry of the future and more abundant in its forms.
And here we may advance to our second class, who believe that the
poetry of the future is to be democratic and formless.
I need quote but a few scraps from characteristic sentences here and
there in a recent paper of Whitman's, in order to present a perfectly
fair view of his whole doctrine. When, for instance, he declares that
Tennyson's poetry is not the poetry of the future because, although it
is "the highest order of verbal melody, exquisitely clean and pure and
almost always perfumed like the tuberose to an extreme of sweetness,"
yet it has "never one democratic page," and is "never free, naive
poetry, but involved, labored, quite sophisticated;" when we find him
bragging of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical
republic" (the United States of course) "with its ruffianly
nominations and elections; its loud, ill-pitched voice, utterly
regardless whether the verb agrees with the nominative; its fights,
errors, eructations, repulsions, dishonesties, audacities; those
fearful and varied, long and continued storm-and-stress stages (so
offensive to the well-regulated, college-bred mind), wherewith nature,
history and time block out nationalities more powerful than the past;"
and when finally we hear him tenderly declaring that "meanwhile
democracy waits the coming of its bards in silence and in
twilight--but 'tis the twilight of dawn;"--we are in sufficient
possession of the distinctive catch-words which summarize his
doctrine.
In examining it, a circumstance occurs to me at the outset which
throws a strange but effective light upon the whole argument. It seems
curious to reflect that the two poets who have most avowedly written
for the _people_, who have professed most distinctively to represent
and embody the thought of the people, and to be bone of the people's
bone, and flesh of the people's flesh, are precisely the two who have
most signally failed of all popular acceptance and who have most
exclusively found audience at the other extreme of culture. These are
Wordsworth and Whitman. We all know how strenuously and faithfully
Wordsworth believed that in using the simplest words and treating the
lowliest themes, he was bringing poetry back near to the popular
heart; yet Wordsworth's greatest admirer is Mr. Matthew Arnold, the
apostle of culture, the farthest remove from anything that could be
called popular; and in point of fact it is probable that many a
peasant who would feel his blood stir in hearing _A man's a man for a'
that_, would grin and guffaw if you should read him Wordsworth's
_Lambs_ and _Peter Grays_.
And a precisely similar fate has met Whitman. Professing to be a
mudsill and glorying in it, chanting democracy and the shirt-sleeves
and equal rights, declaring that he is nothing if not one of the
people; nevertheless the people, the democracy, will yet have nothing
to do with him, and it is safe to say that his sole audience has lain
among such representatives of the highest culture as Emerson and the
English _illuminated_.
The truth is, that if closely examined, Whitman, instead of being a
true democrat, is simply the most incorrigible of aristocrats masquing
in a peasant's costume; and his poetry, instead of being the natural
outcome of a fresh young democracy, is a product which would be
impossible except in a highly civilized society.
III.
At our last meeting we endeavored to secure some solid basis for our
ideas of form in general, and to develop thereupon some conceptions of
form in art, and especially of literary form, which would enable us to
see our way clear among misconceptions of this subject which prevail.
We there addressed ourselves towards considering particularly three of
these misconceptions. The first we examined was that which predicts
the total death of imaginative literature--poetry, novels and all--in
consequence of a certain supposed quality of imagination by virtue of
which, like some ruin-haunting animals, it cannot live in the light;
so that the destructive explanations of advancing science, it was
apprehended, would gradually force all our imaginative energies back
into the dark crevices of old fable and ruined romance, until finally,
penetrating these also, it would exterminate the species. We first
tested this case by laying it alongside the historic facts in the
case: confining our view to England, we found that science and poetry
had been developing alongside of each other ever since early in the
seventeenth century; inquiring into the general effect of this long
contact, we could only find that it was to make our general poetry
greatly richer in substance and finer in form; and upon testing this
abstract conclusion by a concrete examination of Tennyson--as a poet
most likely to show the influence of science, because himself most
exposed to it, indeed most saturated with it--we found from several
readings in _In Memoriam_ that whether as to love or friendship, or
the sacredness of marriage, or the pure sense of beauty, or the true
relation of knowledge to wisdom, or faith in God, the effect of
science had been on the whole to broaden the conceptions and to
clarify the forms in which they were expressed by this great poet.
And having thus appealed to facts, we found further that in the nature
of things no such destruction could follow; that what we call
explanation in science is at bottom only a reduction of unfamiliar
mysteries to terms of familiar mysteries, and that, since to the true
imaginative mind, whether of poet or novelist, the mysteries of this
world grow all the greater as they grow more familiar, the necessary
effect of scientific explanations is at last the indefinite increase
of food for the imagination. The modern imagination, indeed, shall
still love mystery; but it is not the shallow mystery of those small
darks which are enclosed by caves and crumbling dungeons, it is the
unfathomable mystery of the sunlight and the sun; it is this
inexplicable contradictory shadow of the infinite which is projected
upon the finite; it is this multitudinous flickering of all the other
_ego's_ upon the tissue of my _ego_: these are the lights and shades
and vaguenesses of mystery in which the modern imaginative effort
delights. And here I cannot help adding to what was said on this
subject in the last lecture, by declaring to every young man who may
entertain the hope of poethood, that at this stage of the world you
need not dream of winning the attention of sober people with your
poetry unless that poetry, and your soul behind it, are informed and
saturated at least with the largest final conceptions of current
science. I do not mean that you are to write "Loves of the Plants;" I
do not mean that you are to versify Biology; but I mean that you must
be so far instinct with the scientific thought of the time that your
poetic conceptions will rush as it were from under these pure, cold
facts of science like those Alpine torrents which flow out of
glaciers. Or,--to change the figure for the better--just as the
chemist, in causing chlorine and hydrogen to form hydrochloric acid,
finds that he must not only put the chlorine and hydrogen together,
but he must put them together in the presence of light in order to
make them combine; so the poet of our time will find that his poetic
combinations, his grandest syntheses of wisdom, own this law; and
they, too, must be effected in the presence of the awful light of
science.
Returning to our outline of the last lecture: After we had discussed
this matter, we advanced to the second of the great misconceptions of
the function of form in art--that which holds that the imaginative
effort of the future will be better than that of the present, and that
this improvement will come through a progress towards formlessness.
After quoting several sentences from Whitman which seemed to contain
the substantial argument--to-wit, that the poetry of the future is to
be signalized by independence of form, and is, by virtue of this
independence, to gain strength, and become a democratic poetry, as
contrasted with the supposed weak and aristocratic poetry of the
present--I called your attention to a notable circumstance which seems
to throw a curious light along this inquiry: that circumstance being
that the two English poets who have most exclusively laid claim to
represent the people in poetry, to express nothing but the people's
heart in the people's words, namely Wordsworth and Whitman, are
precisely the two whose audience has been most exclusively confined to
the other extreme of culture. Wordsworth, instead of appealing to
Hodge, Nokes, and Stiles; instead of being found in penny editions on
the collier's shelves; is most cherished by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the
high-priest of culture. And so with Whitman: we may say with safety
that no preacher was ever so decisively rejected by his own:
continually crying democracy in the market-place, and crying it in
forms or no-forms professing to be nothing but products of the
democratic spirit; nevertheless the democracy everywhere have turned a
deaf ear, and it is only with a few of the most retired thinkers of
our time that Whitman has found even a partial acceptance.
And finally, by way of showing a reason for this state of things in
Whitman's case, the last lecture closed with the assertion that
Whitman's poetry, in spite of his belief that it is democratic, is
really aristocratic to the last degree; and instead of belonging, as
he asserts to an early and fresh-thoughted stage of a republic, is
really poetry which would be impossible except in a highly civilized
state of society.
Here, then, let us take up the thread of that argument. In the
quotations which were given from Whitman's paper, we have really the
ideal democracy and democrat of this school. It is curious to reflect
in the first place that in point of fact no such democracy, no such
democrat, has ever existed in this country. For example: when Whitman
tells us of "the measureless viciousness of the great radical
republic, with its ruffianly nominations and elections; its loud
ill-pitched voice; its fights, errors, eructations, dishonesties,
audacities;" _et cetera_: when he tells us this, with a sort of
caressing touch upon all the bad adjectives, rolling the "errors" and
the "audacities" and the "viciousness" under his tongue and faithfully
believing that the strength which recommends his future poetry is to
come out of viciousness and ruffianly elections and the like; let us
inquire, to what representative facts in our history does this
picture correspond; what great democrat who has helped to "block out"
this present republic, sat for this portrait? Is it George Washington,
that beautiful, broad tranquil spirit whom, I sometimes think, even we
Americans have never yet held quite at his true value,--is it
Washington who was vicious, dishonest, audacious, combative? But
Washington had some hand in blocking out this republic. Or what would
our courtly and philosophic Thomas Jefferson look like, if you should
put this slouch hat on him, and open his shirt-front at the bosom, and
set him to presiding over a ruffianly nomination? Yet he had some hand
in blocking out this republic. In one of Whitman's poems I find him
crying out to Americans, in this same strain: "O lands! would you be
freer than all that has ever been before? If you would be freer than
all that has been before, come listen to me." And this is the
deliverance:
"Fear grace--fear elegance, civilization, delicatesse,
Fear the mellow sweet, the sucking of honey-juice;
Beware the advancing mortal ripening of nature,
Beware what precedes the decay of the ruggedness of States and men."
And in another line, he rejoices in America because--"Here are the
roughs, beards, ... combativeness, and the like".
But where are these roughs, these beards, and this combativeness? Were
the Adamses and Benjamin Franklin roughs? was it these who taught us
to make ruffianly nominations? But they had some hand in blocking out
this republic. In short, leaving each one to extend this list of names
for himself, it may be fairly said that nowhere in history can one
find less of that ruggedness which Whitman regards as the essential
of democracy; nowhere more of that grace which he considers fatal to
it, than among the very representative democrats who blocked out this
republic. In truth, when Whitman cries "fear the mellow sweet," and
"beware the mortal ripening of nature", we have an instructive
instance of the extreme folly into which a man may be led by mistaking
a metaphor for an argument. The argument here is, you observe, that
because an apple in the course of nature rots soon after it mellows,
_argal_ a man cannot mellow his spirit with culture without decaying
soon afterwards. Of course it is sufficient only to reflect _non
sequitur_; for it is precisely the difference between the man and the
apple, that, whereas every apple must rot after ripeness, no man is
bound to.
If therefore after an inquiry ranging from Washington and Jefferson
down to William Cullen Bryant (that surely unrugged and graceful
figure who was so often called the finest American gentleman) and
Lowell, and Longfellow, and the rest who are really the men that are
blocking out our republic, if we find not a single representative
American democrat to whom any of these pet adjectives apply,--not one
who is measurelessly vicious, or ruffianly, or audacious, or purposely
rugged, or contemptuous towards the graces of life,--then we are
obliged to affirm that the whole ideal drawn by Whitman is a fancy
picture with no counterpart in nature. It is perfectly true that we
have ruffianly nominations; but we have them because the real
democrats who govern our republic, who represent our democracy, stay
away from nominating conventions and leave them to the ruffians.
Surely no one can look with the most cursory eye upon our everyday
American life without seeing that the real advance of our society goes
on not only without, but largely in spite of that ostensible
apparatus, legislative, executive, judicial which we call the
Government, &c.; that really the most effective legislation in our
country is that which is enacted in the breasts of the individual
democrats who compose it. And this is true democratic growth, every
day; more and more, each man perceives that the shortest and most
effectual method of securing his own rights is to respect the rights
of others; and so every day do we less and less need outside
interference in our individual relations; so that every day we
approach nearer and nearer towards that ideal government in which each
man is, mainly, his own legislator, his own governor or president, and
his own judge, and in which the public government is mainly a concert
of measures for the common sanitation and police.
But again: it is true as Whitman says that we have dishonesties; but
we punish them, they are not representative, they have no more
relation to democracy than the English thief has to English
aristocracy.
From what spirit of blindness is it alleged that these things are
peculiar to our democracy? Whitman here explicitly declares that the
over-dainty Englishman "can not stomach the high-life below stairs of
our social status so far;" this high-life consisting of the
measureless viciousness, the dishonesty, and the like. Cannot stomach
it, no; who could? But how absurd to come down to this republic, to
American society for these things! Alas, I know an Englishman, who,
three hundred years ago, found these same things in that aristocracy
there; and he too, thank heaven, could not stomach them, for he has
condemned them in a sonnet which is the solace of all sober-thoughted
ages. I mean Shakspeare, and his sonnet
LXVI.
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,--
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily foresworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired of all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
It is true that we have bad manners; yet among the crowds at the
Centennial Exposition it was universally remarked that in no country
in the world could such vast multitudes of people have assembled day
after day with so few arrests by the police, with so little disorder,
and with such an apparent universal and effective sentiment of respect
for the law.
Now if we carry the result of this inquiry over into art; if we are
presented with a poetry which professes to be democratic because
it--the poetry--is measurelessly vicious, purposely eructant, striving
after ruggedness, despising grace, like the democracy described by
Whitman; then we reply that as matter of fact there never was any such
American democracy and that the poetry which represents it has no
constituency. And herein seems a most abundant solution of the fact
just now brought to your notice, that the actually existing democracy
have never accepted Whitman. But here we are met with the cry of
strength and manfulness. Everywhere throughout Whitman's poetry the
"rude muscle," the brawn, the physical bigness of the American
prairie, the sinew of the Western backwoodsman, are apotheosized, and
all these, as Whitman asserts, are fitly chanted in his "savage song."
Here, then, is a great stalwart man, in perfect health, all brawn and
rude muscle, set up before us as the ideal of strength. Let us examine
this strength a little. For one, I declare that I do not find it
impressive. Yonder, in a counting-room--alas, in how many
counting-rooms!--a young man with weak eyes bends over a ledger, and
painfully casts up the figures day by day, on pitiful wages, to
support his mother, or to send his younger brother to school, or some
such matter. If we watch the young man when he takes down his hat,
lays off his ink-splotched office-coat, and starts home for dinner, we
perceive that he is in every respect the opposite of the stalwart
Whitman ideal; his chest is not huge, his legs are inclined to be
pipe-stems, and his dress is like that of any other book-keeper. Yet
the weak-eyed pipe-stem-legged young man impresses me as more of a
man, more of a democratic man, than the tallest of Whitman's roughs;
to the eye of my spirit there is more strength in this man's daily
endurance of petty care and small weariness for love; more of the sort
of stuff which makes a real democracy and a sound republic, than in an
army of Whitman's unshaven loafers.
I know--and count it among the privileges of my life that I do--a
woman who has spent her whole life in bed for twenty years past,
confined by a curious form of spinal disease which prevents locomotion
and which in spite of constant pain and disturbance leaves the system
long unworn. Day by day she lies helpless, at the mercy of all those
tyrannical small needs which become so large under such circumstances;
every meal must be brought to her, a drink of water must be handed;
and she is not rich, to command service. Withal her nature is of the
brightest and most energetic sort. Yet, surrounded by these
unspeakable pettinesses, enclosed in this cage of contradictions, the
woman has made herself the centre of an adoring circle of the
brightest people; her room is called "Sunnyside;" when brawny men are
tired they go to her for rest, when people in the rudest physical
health are sick of life they go to her for the curative virtue of her
smiles. Now this woman has not so much rude muscle in her whole body
as Whitman's man has in his little finger: she is so fragile that long
ago some one called her "White Flower," and by this name she is much
known; it costs her as much labor to press a friend's hand as it costs
Whitman's rough to fell a tree; regarded from the point of view of
brawn and sinew, she is simply absurd; yet to the eye of my spirit
there is more manfulness in one moment of her loving and
self-sacrificing existence than in an aeon of muscle-growth and
sinew-breeding; and hers is the manfulness which is the only solution
of a true democrat, hers is the manfulness of which only can a
republic be built. A republic is the government of the spirit; a
republic depends upon the self-control of each member: you cannot make
a republic out of muscles and prairies and Rocky mountains; republics
are made of the spirit.
Nay, when we think of it, how little is it a matter of the future, how
entirely is it a matter of the past, when people come running at us
with rude muscle and great mountain, and such matters of purely
physical bigness to shake our souls? How long ago is it that they
began to put great bearskin caps on soldiers with a view to make them
look grisly and formidable when advancing on the enemy? It is so long
ago that the practice has survived mainly as ceremonial, and the
little boys on the streets now laugh at this ferociousness when the
sappers and miners come by who affect this costume.
Yet, here in the nineteenth century we behold artists purposely
setting bearskin caps upon their poetry to make it effective. This
sort of thing never yet succeeded as against Anglo-Saxon people. I
cannot help thinking here of old Lord Berners' account translated from
Froissart, of how the Genoese cross-bowmen attempted to frighten the
English warriors at the battle of Crecy. "Whan the Genowayes were
assembled togayder, and beganne to aproche, they made a great leape
and crye, to abasshe thenglysshmen, but they stode styll, and styredde
not for all that; thane the Genowayes agayne the seconde tyme made
another leape, and a fell crye, and stepped forward a lytell, and
thenglysshmen remeved not one fote; thirdly, agayne they leapt and
cryed, and went forthe tyll they come within shotte; thane shot
feersley with their crosbowes; than thenglysshe archers stept forthe
one pase, and lette fly their arowes so hotly, and so thycke, that it
semed snowe; when the Genowayes felt the arowes persynge through
heedes, armes, and brestes, many of them cast downe their crosbowes,
and dyde cutte their strynges, and retourned dysconfited."
And so the Poetry of the Future has advanced upon us with a great leap
and a fell cry, relying upon its loud, ill-pitched voice, but the
democracy has stirred not for all that. Perhaps we may fairly say,
gentlemen, it is five hundred years too late to attempt to capture
Englishmen with a yell.
I think it interesting to compare Whitman's often expressed contempt
for poetic beauty--he taunts the young magazine writers of the present
time with having the beauty disease--with some utterances of one who
praised the true function of ruggedness in works the world will not
soon forget. I mean Thomas Carlyle, who has so recently passed into
the Place where the strong and the virtuous and the beautiful souls
assemble themselves. In one of Carlyle's essays he speaks as follows
of Poetic Beauty. These words scarcely sound as if they came from the
lover of Danton and Mirabeau:
"It dwells and is born in the inmost Spirit of Man, united to all love
of Virtue, to all true belief in God; or rather, it is one with this
love and this belief, another phase of the same highest principle in
the mysterious infinitude of the human Soul. To apprehend this beauty
of poetry, in its full and purest brightness, is not easy, but
difficult; thousands on thousands eagerly read poems, and attain not
the smallest taste of it; yet to all uncorrupted hearts, some
effulgences of this heavenly glory are here and there revealed; and to
apprehend it clearly and wholly, to require and maintain a sense of
heart that sees and worships it, is the last perfection of all humane
culture."
In the name of all really manful democracy, in the name of the true
strength that only can make our republic reputable among the nations,
let us repudiate the strength that is no stronger than a human biceps;
let us repudiate the manfulness that averages no more than six feet
high. My democrat, the democrat whom I contemplate with pleasure; the
democrat who is to write or to read the poetry of the future, may have
a mere thread for his biceps, yet he shall be strong enough to handle
hell, he shall play ball with the earth, and albeit his stature may be
no more than a boy's, he shall still be taller than the great redwoods
of California; his height shall be the height of great resolution, and
love and faith and beauty and knowledge and subtle meditation; his
head shall be forever among the stars.
But here we are met with the cry of freedom. This poetry is free, it
is asserted, because it is independent of form. But this claim is also
too late. It should have been made at least before the French
Revolution. We all know what that freedom means in politics which is
independent of form, of law. It means myriad-fold slavery to a mob. As
in politics, so in art. Once for all, in art, to be free is not to be
independent of any form, it is to be master of many forms. Does the
young versifier of the Whitman school fancy that he is free because
under the fond belief that he is yielding himself to nature, stopping
not the words lest he may fail to make what Whitman proudly calls "a
savage song," he allows himself to be blown about by every wind of
passion? Is a ship free because, without rudder or sail, it is turned
loose to the winds, and has no master but nature? Nature is the tyrant
of tyrants. Now, just as that freedom of the ship on the sea means
shipwreck, so independence of form in art means death. Here one recurs
with pleasure to the aphorism cited in the last lecture; in art, as
elsewhere, "he who will not answer to the rudder shall answer to the
rocks." I find all the great artists of time striving after this same
freedom; but it is not by destroying, it is by extending the forms of
art, that all sane and sober souls hope to attain. In a letter of
Beethoven's to the Arch-duke Rudolph, written in 1819, I find him
declaring "But freedom and progress are our true aim in the world of
art, just as in the great creation at large."
We have seen how in the creation at large progress is effected by the
continual multiplication of new forms. It was this advance which
Beethoven wished: to become master of new and more beautiful forms,
not to abolish form. In a letter of his to Matthisson, as early as
1800 accompanying a copy of _Adelaide_, we may instructively gather
what he thought of this matter: "Indeed even now I send you _Adelaide_
with a feeling of timidity. You know yourself what changes the lapse
of some years brings forth in an artist who continues to make
progress; the greater the advances we make in art the less we are
satisfied with our works of an early date." This unstudied declaration
becomes full of significance when we remember that this same
_Adelaide_ is still held, by the common consent of all musicians, to
be the most perfect song-form in music; and it is given to young
composers as a type and model from which all other forms are to be
developed. We may sum up the whole matter by applying to these persons
who desire formlessness, words which were written of those who have
been said to desire death:
Whatever crazy Sorrow saith,
No life that breathes with human breath
Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant,
O life, not death, for which we pant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.
In art, form and chaos are so nearly what life and death are in
nature, that we do not greatly change this stanza if we read:
'Tis form whereof our art is scant,
O form, not chaos, for which we pant,
More form, and fuller, that I want.
I find some deliverances in Epictetus which speak so closely to more
than one of the points just discussed that I must quote a sentence or
two. "What then", he says--in the chapter "About Freedom" "is that
which makes a man free from hindrance and makes him his own master?
For wealth does not do it, nor consulship, nor provincial government,
nor royal power; but something else must be discovered. What then is
that which when we write makes us free from hindrance and unimpeded.
The knowledge of the art of writing. What then is it (which gives
freedom) in playing the lute? The science of playing the lute." If
Whitman's doctrine is true, the proper method of acquiring freedom on
the lute is to bring lute-music to that point where the loud jangling
chord produced by a big hand sweeping at random across the strings is
to take the place of the finical tunes and harmonies now held in
esteem. "Therefore" continues Epictetus, "in life, also, it is the
science of life.... When you wish the body to be sound, is it in your
power or not?--It is not. When you wish it to be healthy? Neither is
this in my power." (I complain of Whitman's democracy that it has no
provision for sick, or small, or puny, or plain-featured, or
hump-backed, or any deformed people, and that his democracy is really
the worst kind of aristocracy, being an aristocracy of nature's
favorites in the matter of muscle.) And so of estate, house, horses,
life and death, Epictetus continues; these are not in our power, they
cannot make us free. So that, in another chapter, he cries: This is
the true athlete, the man who exercises himself against such
appearances. Stay, wretch, do not be carried away. Great is the
combat, divine is the work: it is for kingship, for freedom, for
happiness.
And lastly, the Poetry of the Future holds that all modern poetry,
Tennyson particularly, is dainty and over-perfumed, and Whitman speaks
of it with that contempt which he everywhere affects for the dandy.
But what age of time ever yielded such a dandy as the founder of this
school, Whitman himself? The simpering beau who is the product of the
tailor's art is certainly absurd enough; but what difference is there
between that and the other dandy-upside-down who from equal motives of
affectation throws away coat and vest, dons a slouch hat, opens his
shirt so as to expose his breast, and industriously circulates his
portrait, thus taken, in his own books. And this dandyism--the
dandyism of the roustabout--I find in Whitman's poetry from beginning
to end. Everywhere it is conscious of itself, everywhere it is
analysing itself, everywhere it is posing to see if it cannot assume a
naive and striking attitude, everywhere it is screwing up its eyes,
not into an eyeglass like the conventional dandy, but into an
expression supposed to be fearsomely rough and barbaric and frightful
to the terror-stricken reader; and it is almost safe to say that one
half of Whitman's poetic work has consisted of a detailed description
of the song he is going to sing. It is the extreme of sophistication
in writing.
But if we must have dandyism in our art, surely the softer sort, which
at least leans toward decorum and gentility, is preferable; for that
at worst becomes only laughable, while the rude dandyism, when it does
acquire a factitious interest by being a blasphemy against real
manhood, is simply tiresome.
I have thus dwelt upon these claims of the Whitman school, not so much
because of any intrinsic weight they possess, as because they are
advanced in such taking and sacred names,--of democracy, of manhood,
of freedom, of progress. Upon the most earnest examination, I can find
it nothing but wholly undemocratic; not manful, but dandy; not free,
because the slave of nature; not progressive, because its whole
momentum is derived from the physically-large which ceased to astonish
the world ages ago, in comparison with spiritual greatness.
Indeed, this matter has been pushed so far, with the apparent, but
wholly unreal sanction of so many influential names, that in speaking
to those who may be poets of the future, I cannot close these hasty
words upon the Whitman school without a fervent protest, in the name
of all art and all artists, against a poetry which has painted a great
scrawling picture of the human body, and has written under it: "_This
is the soul_;" which shouts a profession of religion in every line,
but of a religion that, when examined, reveals no tenet, no rubric,
save that a man must be natural, must abandon himself to every
passion; and which constantly roars its belief in God, but with a
camerado air as if it were patting the Deity on the back, and bidding
Him, _Cheer up_, and hope for further encouragement.
We are here arrived at a very fitting point to pass on and consider
that third misconception of the relation between science and art,
which has been recently formulated by M. Emile Zola in his work called
_Le Roman Experimental_. Zola's name has been so widely associated
with a certain class of novels, that I am fortunately under no
necessity to describe them, and I need only say that the work in
question is a formal reply to a great number of objections which have
come from many quarters as to the characters and events which Zola's
novels have brought before the public.
His book, though a considerable volume, may be said to consist of two
sentences which the author has varied with great adroitness into many
forms. These two sentences I may sum up, as follows: (1) every novel
must hereafter be the entirely unimaginative record of an experiment
in human passion; and (2) every writer of the romantic school in
France, particularly Victor Hugo, is an ass.
You are not to suppose that in this last sentiment I have strengthened
Zola's expressions. A single quotation will show sufficient authority.
As, for example, where M. Zola cries out to those who are criticizing
him: "Every one says: 'Ah yes, the naturalists! they are those men
with dirty hands who want all novels to be written in slang, and
choose the most disgusting subjects.' Not at all! you lie!... Do not
say that I am idiot enough to wish to paint nothing but the gutter."
But with this quarrel we are not here concerned; I simply wish to
examine in the briefest way Zola's proposition to convert the novel
into a work of science. His entire doctrine may be fairly, indeed
amply gathered in the following quotations:
"We continue by our observations and experiments the work of the
physiologist, who has himself employed that of the physicist and
the chemist. We after a fashion pursue scientific psychology in
order to complete scientific physiology; and in order to complete
the evolution, we need only carry to the study of nature and man
the invaluable tool of the experimental method. In a word, we
should work upon characters, passions, human and social facts, as
the physicist and chemist work with inorganic bodies, as the
physiologist works with living organisms. Determinism controls
everything.
"This, then, is what constitutes the experimental novel,--to
understand the mechanism of human phenomena, to show the
machinery of intellectual and emotional manifestations as
physiology shall explain them to us under the influence of
heredity and surrounding circumstances; then to show man living
in the social _milieu_ which he has himself produced, and which
he modifies every day, while at the same time experiencing in his
turn a continual transformation. So we rest on physiology; we
take man isolated from the hands of the physiologist to continue
the solution of the problem and to solve scientifically the
question, How men live as members of society.--We are, in a word,
experimental philosophers, showing by experiment how a passion
exhibits itself in certain social surroundings. The day when we
shall understand the mechanism of this passion, it may be
treated, reduced, made as inoffensive as possible."
These propositions need not detain us long. In the first place, let us
leave the vagueness of abstract assertions and, coming down to the
concrete, let us ask who is to make the experiment recorded in the
novel? Zola says, "We (the novelists) are experimental philosophers,
showing by experiment how a passion exhibits itself in certain social
surroundings." Very well; in one of Zola's most popular novels, the
heroine Nana, after a remarkable career, dies of small-pox; and a
great naturalistic ado is made over this death. A correspondent of the
_Herald_, writing from Paris, says: "In a very few days we are to be
treated to the stage version of _Nana_, at the Ambigu. Nana, it will
be remembered, dies at the end of the story of small-pox. We are to be
given every incident of the agony, every mark of the small-pox. Pretty
Mlle. Massin (who is to play this death-scene) is to be the crowning
attraction of this new play.... We shall be shown a real death of
small-pox, or the nearest possible approach to it. Mlle. Massin, who
is to sustain the pleasing part of the "heroine," will make her pretty
face hideous for the occasion. At half past 11 every evening she will
issue from behind the drapery of a bed, clad only in the most
indispensable of nightly raiment--and that "in most admired
disorder"--her neck, cheeks and forehead disfigured, changed and
unrecognizable for simulated pustules. At twenty minutes to 12 the
pustules will be too much for her, and she will expire. At a quarter
to 12 the deafening applause of the public will call her to life
again, and she will bow her acknowledgments."
Applying Zola's theory, sociology is to find here a very instructive
record of how a woman such as Nana would comport herself when dying of
small-pox; and furthermore, his description of it must be an exact
record of an experiment in death from small-pox conducted by M. Zola
in person. But now recurring to our question, let us ask, how could M.
Zola conduct this experiment? It would certainly be inconvenient for
him to catch the small-pox and die, with a view to recording his
sensations; and yet it is perfectly apparent that the conditions of
scientific experiment could not be satisfied in any other way. M. Zola
would probably reply with effusion, that he had taken pains to go to a
small-pox hospital and to study with great care the behavior of a
patient dying with that disease. But, we immediately rejoin, this is
very far from what his theory bound him to show us; his theory bound
him to show us not some person, any person, dying of small-pox, but
Nana with all her individuality derived from heredity and from her own
spontaneous variation--it was Nana dying of small-pox that he must set
before us; one person dies one way and another person dies another
way, even of the same disease; Smith, a very tragic person, would make
a death-scene full of tragic message and gesture; Brown might close
his eyes and pass without a word; Nana, particularly, with her
peculiar career and striking individuality, would naturally make a
peculiar and striking death. Now since Nana is purely a creation of
Zola, (unless indeed the novel is a biography, which is not pretended)
Zola is the only person in the world who understands Nana's feelings
in death or on any occasion; and this being so, it is simply
impossible that Zola could make a scientific experiment of Nana's
death from small-pox without dying himself. This seems so absurd that
one goes back to _Le Roman Experimental_ to see if Zola's idea of a
scientific experiment has not something peculiar about it; and one
quickly finds that it has. It is in fact interesting to observe that
though Zola has this word experiment continually on his lips, yet he
never means that the novelist is to conduct a real, gross, downright,
actual brute of an experiment; and the word with him is wholly
Pickwickian, signifying no more than that the novelist, availing
himself of such realistic helps as he can find in hospitals and the
like, is to evolve therefrom something which he believes to be the
natural course of things. Examine the book wherever you may, the
boasted experiment, the pivot of the whole system, fades into this.
The experiment of Zola is as if a professor of chemistry, knowing
something of the properties of given substances desiring to see how a
certain molecule would behave itself in the presence of a certain
other molecule, hitherto untried in this connection, instead of going
into his laboratory and bringing the molecules together and observing
what they actually did, should quietly sit before his desk and write
off a comfortable account of how he thought these molecules would
behave, judging from his previous knowledge of their properties. It is
still more interesting to find that Zola is apparently unconscious of
the difference between these two modes of experiment. About this
unconsciousness I have my own theory. I think it entirely probable
that if these two kinds of experiment were described to Zola he would
maintain with perfect good faith that they were exactly the same.
There is a phase of error--perhaps we may call it hallucination--in
which certain sorts of minds come to believe that two things which
have been habitually associated are always the same. For instance, a
friend of mine has told me that a certain estimable teacher of the
French language, who, after carrying on his vocation for many years,
during which English and French became equally instinctive tongues to
him, was accustomed to maintain that English and French were
absolutely one and the same language. "When you say _water_," he was
accustomed to argue to my friend, "you mean water; when I say _l'eau_
I mean water; _water--l'eau_, _l'eau--water_; do you not see? We mean
the same thing; it is the same language."
However this may be, nothing is clearer than that Zola's conception of
an experiment is what I have described it--namely, an evolving from
the inner consciousness of what the author _thinks_ the experimental
subjects would do under given circumstances. Here are some of Zola's
own words: and surely nothing more naive was ever uttered: "The
writer" (of the novel) "employs both observation and experiment. The
observer gives the facts as he has observed them ... and establishes
the solid ground on which his characters shall march, and the
phenomena shall develop themselves. _Then the experimenter appears and
conducts the experiment; that is to say_" (I am quoting from M. Zola)
"_he moves the characters in a particular story to show that the
sequence of facts will be such as is determined in the study of
phenomena_." That is to say, to carry Zola's "experiment" into
chemistry: knowing something of chlorine and something of hydrogen
separately, a chemist who wishes to know their behavior under each
other's influence may "experiment" upon that behavior by giving his
opinion as to what chlorine and hydrogen would likely do under given
circumstances.
It seems incredible, but it is logically beyond question, that by this
short process we have got to the bottom of this whole elaborate system
of the Experimental Novel, and have found that it is nothing but a
repetition of the old, old trick of the hand of Jacob and the voice of
Esau. Think how much self-sacrifice and labor, of how many noble and
brave spirits, from Horrox and Hooke in the seventeenth century down
to the hundreds of scientific men who at this moment are living
obscure and laborious lives in the search of truth,--think, I say, how
much fervent and pious labor has gone to invest the mere name of
scientific experiment with that sacredness under which the Zola school
is now claiming the rights and privileges of science, for what we have
seen is _not_ science, and what, we might easily see if it were worth
showing, _is_ mere corruption. The hand is the hand of science; but
the voice is the voice of a beast.
To many this animal voice has seemed a portentous sound. But if we
think what kind of beast it is, we cease to fear. George Eliot,
somewhere in _Adam Bede_, has a _mot_: when a donkey sets out to sing,
everybody knows beforehand what the tune will be. This voice has been
heard many times before. Long before Zola came on the stage, I find
Schiller crying in his sweet silver tones to some who were likewise
misusing both art and science: "Unhappy mortal, that, with science and
art, the noblest of all instruments, effectest and attemptest nothing
more than the day-drudge with the meanest; that in the domain of
perfect Freedom bearest about in thee the spirit of a slave."
In these words, Schiller has at once prophesied and punished The
Experimental Romance.
But there is another view of Zola's claims which leads us into some
thoughts particularly instructive at the present time, and which will
carry us very directly to the more special studies which will engage
our attention.
After the views of form which have been presented to you, it will not
be necessary for me to argue that even if Zola's Experimental Novel
were a physical possibility, it would be an artistic absurdity. If you
_could_ make a scientific record of actual experiment in human
passion, very well: but why should we call that record a novel, if we
do not call Professor Huxley's late work on the crayfish a novel, or
if we do not call any physician's report of some specially interesting
clinical experience to the _Medical and Surgical Journal_ a novel?
Here we are put upon securing for ourselves perfectly clear
conceptions as to certain relations between that so-called _poetic_
activity and _scientific_ activity of the human mind which find
themselves in a singularly interesting contact in the true and worthy
novel which we are going to study. Merely reminding you of the
distinction with which every one is more or less familiar
theoretically, that that activity which we variously call "poetic,"
"imaginative," or "creative," _is_ essentially synthetic, is a process
of putting together, while the scientific process seems distinctively
analytic, or a tearing apart; let us pass from this idea to those
applications of the poetic faculty which are made whenever a
scientific searcher goes further than the mere collection of facts, to
classify them and to effect generalizations. This is an activity of
what is well called the scientific imagination. Now what is the
difference between a work of the scientific imagination and a work of
the poetic imagination? Without going into subtleties, I think the
shortest way to gain a perfectly clear working idea of this difference
is to confine our attention to the differing results of these
activities: the scientific imagination results in a formula, whose
paramount purpose is to be as _short_ and as comprehensive as
possible; the poetic imagination results in a created form of forms,
whose paramount purpose is to be as _beautiful_ and as comprehensive
as possible. For example, the well-known formula of evolution: that
evolution is a process from the uniform and indefinite to the
multiform and definite; that is a result of long efforts of the
scientific imagination; while on the other hand Tennyson's _In
Memoriam_, in which we have deep matters discussed in the most
beautiful words and the most musical forms of verse, is a poetic work.
And now if we pass one step farther and consider what would happen if
the true scientific activity and the true poetic activity should
engage themselves upon one and the same set of facts, we arrive at the
novel.
The great modern novelist is at once scientific and poetic: and here,
it seems to me, in the novel, we have the meeting, the reconciliation,
the kiss, of science and poetry. For example: George Eliot, having
with those keen eyes of hers collected and analyzed and sorted many
facts of British life, binds them together into a true poetic
synthesis, in, for instance, _Daniel Deronda_, when instead of giving
us the ultimate relations of all her facts in the shape of a formula,
like that of evolution, she gives them to us in the beautiful creation
of Gwendolen Harleth and all the other striking forms which move
through the book as embodiments in flesh and blood of the scientific
relations between all her facts.
Perhaps we will find it convenient here, too, to base perfectly clear
ideas of the three existing schools of novel-writing upon these
foregoing principles. It has been common for some time to hear of the
Romantic and the Realistic school, and lately a third term has been
brought into use by the Zola section who call themselves the
Naturalistic school. It is easy to see that these terms have arisen
from the greater or less prominence given now to the poetic activity,
now to the scientific activity, in novel writing; those who most rely
on the poetic being the Romantic, those on a combination of the poetic
and scientific the Realistic, and those who entirely reject the
imagination (as Zola professes to do) the Naturalistic school. At all
events, then, not troubling ourselves with the Naturalists who, as we
have seen, call that an experiment which is only an imaginative
product; we are prepared to study the Novel as a work in which science
is carried over into the region of art. We are not to regard the novel
therefore as ought else but a work of art, and the novelist as an
artist.
One rejoices to find Emerson discussing the novel in this light
purely, in his very suggestive essay on "Books":--
"Whilst the prudential and economical tone of society starves the
imagination, affronted Nature gets such indemnity as she may. The
novel is that allowance and frolic the imagination finds. Everything
else pins it down, and men flee for redress to Byron, Scott, Disraeli,
Dumas, Sand, Balzac, Dickens, Thackeray and Reade.
"The imagination infuses a certain volatility and intoxication. It has
a flute which sets the atoms of our frame in a dance, like planets;
and, once so liberated, the whole man reeling drunk to the music, they
never quite subside to their old stony state."
Nay, we have such beautiful novels in the world, novels far from the
experimental romances by which we are not _perfected_ but _infected_
(_non perficitur_, _inficitur_), as old Burton quotes in the
_Anatomy_; novels in which scientific harmony has passed into its
heavenly after-life of wisdom, novels in which the pure sense of
poetic beauty is so tenderly drawn out, that I love to think of them
in the terms which our most beauty-loving of modern poets has applied
to beauty, in the opening of _Endymion_:
A thing of beauty is a joy forever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing;
Therefore on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'erdarkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
IV.
The points discussed at our last meeting were mainly of such a nature
that I need not occupy your time with the detailed review which has
seemed advisable heretofore.
You will remember, in a general way, that we finished examining the
claims of the poetry of the future, as presented by Whitman, and found
reason to believe, from several trains of argument, that its alleged
democratic spirit was based on a political misconception; that its
religious spirit was no more than that general feeling of good
fellowship and _cameraderie_ which every man of the world knows to be
the commonest of virtues among certain classes; its strength rested
upon purely physical qualifications which have long ago practically
ceased to be strength; its contempt for dandyism was itself only a
cruder dandyism, and its proposed substitution of power for beauty not
only an artistic blindness but a historical error as to the general
progress of this world, which has been _from_ strength _to_ beauty
ever since the ponderous old gods Oceanus and Gaea--representatives of
rude strength--gave way to the more orderly (that is, more beautiful)
reign of Saturn, and he in turn to the still more orderly and
beauty-representing Jupiter, whom Chaucer has called the "fadyr of
delicacye."
Passing thus from the Whitman school, we attacked that third
misconception of literary form which had taken the shape of the
so-called naturalistic school, as led by Zola in his novels and
defended by him in his recent work, _The Experimental Romance_. Here
we quickly discovered that if the term "experiment" were used by this
school in its ordinary and scientific sense, it would, in a large
number of cases, involve conditions which would exterminate the
authors of the projected experimental romances often at an early stage
of the plot; but that secondly, this inconvenience was avoided through
the very peculiar meaning which was attached to the word by this
school, and which reveals that they make no more use of experiment, in
point of fact, than any one of the numerous novelists who have for
years been in the habit of studying real life and nature as the basis
of their work.
In short, it appeared that to support the propriety of circulating
such books by calling them experimental romances, was as if a man
should sell profitable poison under the name of scientific milk, and
claim therefor both the gratitude of society and the privileges of
science. Finally, supplying ourselves with clear ideas as to the
difference between what has become so well known in modern times as
the scientific imagination and the poetic imagination, we determined
to regard the novel as a true work of art, and the novelist as an
artist, by reason of the _created forms_ in the novel which were shown
to be the distinctive outcome of the poetical imagination as opposed
to _the formula_ which is the distinctive outcome of the scientific
imagination. Nevertheless, in view of the circumstance that the facts
embodied in these forms are facts which must have been collected by a
genuine exercise of the true scientific faculty of observing and
classifying, we were compelled to regard the novel as a joint product
of science and art, ranking as art by virtue of its final purely
artistic outcome in the shape of beautiful created forms.
It is with a sense of relief that one turns away from what I fear has
seemed the personal and truculent tone of the last lecture--an
appearance almost inseparable from the fact that certain schools of
writing have become represented by the names of their living founders,
and which would, indeed, have prevented your present lecturer from
engaging in the discussion had not his reluctance been overwhelmed by
the sacred duty of protesting against all this forcible occupation of
the temple of art by those who have come certainly not for worship; it
is with a sense of relief that one turns from this to pursue the more
gracious and general studies which will now occupy us.
According to the plan already sketched: having now acquired some clear
fundamental conceptions of the correlations among form, science, art,
and the like notions often so vaguely used, we are next to inquire, as
our first main line of research: Is it really true that what was
explained as the growth in human personality is the continuing single
principle of human progress; is it really true that the difference
between the time of Aeschylus and the time of (say) George Eliot is the
difference in the strength with which the average man feels the scope
and sovereignty of his age? For upon this fundamental point
necessarily depends our final proposition that the modern novel is
itself the expression of this intensified personality and an
expression which could only be made by greatly extending the form of
the Greek drama. Pursuing our custom of leaving the abstract and
plunging into the concrete as soon as possible, let us determine this
question by endeavoring to find some special notable works of antique
and of modern times in which substantially the same subject matter has
been treated; let us then compare the difference in treatment, let us
summarize the picture of things evidently existing in the old, as
contrasted with the modern author's and reader's minds; and finally
let us see whether the differences thus emerging will not force
themselves upon us as differences growing out of personality. For the
purposes of this comparison I have thought that the _Prometheus Bound_
of Aeschylus, the _Prometheus Unbound_ of Shelley, and the _Prince
Deukalion_ of Bayard Taylor offered inviting resources as works which
treat substantially the same story, although the first was written
some two thousand three hundred years before the last two. Permit me
then, in beginning this comparison, to set before you these three
works in the broadest possible sketch by reading from each, here and
there a line such as may bring the action freshly before you and at
the same time elucidate specially the differences in treatment we are
in search of. As I now run rapidly through the _Prometheus_ of
Aeschylus, I ask you to bear along in mind the precise nature of this
spontaneous variation between man and man which I was at some pains to
define in my first lecture; and perhaps I may extend profitably the
partial idea there given by adopting a pretty fancy which I find in
No. 44 of Tennyson's _In Memoriam_, and carrying it to a larger sphere
than there intended. The poet is here expressing the conception that
perhaps the main use of this present life of ours is for each one to
learn _himself_,--possibly as preparatory to learning other things
hereafter. He says:
The baby new to earth and sky
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that 'this is I:'
But as he grows he gathers much,
And learns the use of 'I' and 'me,'
And finds, 'I am not what I see,
And other than the things I touch.'
So rounds he to a separate mind
From whence clear memory may begin,
As thro' the frame that binds him in
His isolation grows defined.
This use may lie in blood and breath,
Which else were fruitless of their due,
Had man to learn himself anew
Beyond the second birth of Death.
Now if we extend the process of growth here described as of a single
child passing through a single life to the collective process of
growth effected by humanity from age to age, we have quite clearly the
principle whose light I wish to shed upon our comparison of the works
I have named. Just as the child learns to know himself--"that I am
I"--so man comes in the course of time to feel more and more
distinctly I am I; and the growth of this feeling continually uproots
his old relations to things and brings about new relations with new
forms to clothe them in.
One may say indeed that this recognition of the supreme finality of
the _ego_ feeling among modern men seems a curious and not unrelated
counterpart of the theory by which the modern physicist, in order to
explain his physical world, divides it into atoms which atoms are
themselves indivisible. We have here the perplexing problem which in
the poem _De Profundis_, partially read to you, was poetically called
"the pain of this divisible, indivisible world." To explain the world,
whether the moral or the physical world, we must suppose it divisible
into atoms; to explain the atom, we must suppose that indivisible. Let
us see then in what form this "pain of the divisible, indivisible
world" with all its attendant pains of contradiction between fate and
free will,--between the Infinite Personality, which should seem
boundless, and the finite personality which nevertheless seems to
bound it,--let us see, I say under what explicit forms this pain
appears in the _Prometheus Bound_, for alas it was an old grief when
Aeschylus was a baby. Here, then, in the centre of the stage lies the
gigantic figure of Prometheus, (let us fancy) stark, prostrate, proud,
unmoving throughout the whole action. Two ministers of Jove, Might and
Force, have him in charge and Hephaestus--the god more commonly known
as Vulcan--stands by with chain, hammer and bolt. Might acquaints us
at once with what is toward.
At length the utmost bound of earth we've reached,
This Scythian soil, this wild untrodden waste.
Hephaestus, now Jove's high behests demand
Thy care; to these steep, cliffy rocks bind down
With close-linked chains of during adamant
This daring wretch. For he the bright rayed fire,
Mother of arts....
Filched from the gods and gave to mortals. Here
.....
Let his pride learn to bow to Jove supreme;
And love men well but love them not too much.
Hephaestus proceeds to chain him, but with many protests, not only
because Prometheus' act seems over-punished, but because he is
Prometheus' kinsman.
Would that some other hand
(He cries)
"Had drawn the lot
To do this deed!"
To which Might replies
All things may be, but this:
To dictate to the gods. There's one that's free,
One only--Jove.
And Hephaestus sullenly acquiesces, as he beats away at his task,
"I know it, and am dumb."
--Amid similar talk--of protest from Vulcan and pitiless menace from
Might--the great blacksmith proceeds to force an adamantine bolt
through the breast of Prometheus, then to nail his feet to the rock,
and so at last cries, in relief,
Let us away, He's fettered, limb and thew.
But Might must have his last pitiless speech.
"There lie,
he exults,--
And feed thy pride on this bare rock,
Filching god's gifts for mortal men. What man
Shall free thee from these woes? Thou hast been called
In vain the Provident:
(_pro-vident_, same as pro-metheus, he who looks ahead, who provides,
the provident.)
had thy soul possessed
The virtue of thy name, thou had'st foreseen
These cunning toils, and had'st unwound thee from them.
Here all depart but Prometheus. Up to this time the Titan has
maintained a proud silence. He now breaks into that large invocation
which seems still to assault our physical ears across the twenty odd
centuries.
O divine Aether, and swift-winged Winds,
And Fountains of the rivers and multitudinous
Laughter of ocean, and thou Earth,
Born mother of us all, and thou bright round
Of the all-seeing Sun, you I invoke!
Behold what ignominy of causeless wrongs
I suffer from the gods, myself a god!
(This, by the way, is one of those passages which our elder poets seem
to have regarded as somehow lying outside the pale of moral law--like
umbrellas--and which they have therefore appropriated without a
thought of blushing. Byron, in _Manfred_, and Shelley, in his
_Prometheus Unbound_, have quite fairly translated parts of it.)
Enter now a chorus of Oceanides, and these continue throughout the
play to perform the functions of exciting sympathy for the
Protagonist, and of calling upon him for information when it becomes
necessary that the audience should know this and that fact essential
to the intelligibility of the action.
For example, after the Oceanides have alighted from their wind-borne
car, and have condoled with the sufferer, Aeschylus makes them the
medium of drawing from Prometheus the recital of his wrongs, and thus
of freshly placing that whole tremendous story before the minds of his
audience.
Speak now,
say the chorus,
"And let us know the whole offence
Jove charges thee withal."
And Prometheus relates
When first the gods their fatal strife began,
And insurrection raged in heaven, some striving
To cast old Kronos from his heavy throne
That Jove might reign, and others to crush i' the bud
His swelling mastery--I wise counsel gave
To the Titans, sons of primal Heaven and Earth;
But gave in vain.
Thus baffled in my plans, I deemed it best,
As things then were, leagued with my mother Themis,
To accept Jove's proffered friendship. By my counsels.
From his primeval throne was Kronos hurled
Into the pit Tartarean, dark, profound,
With all his troop of friends.
Soon as he sat on his ancestral throne
He called the gods together, and assigned
To each his fair allotment and his sphere
Of sway; but, ah! for wretched man!
To him no portion fell: Jove vowed
To blot his memory from the Earth, and mould
The race anew. I only of the gods
Thwarted his will; and, but for my strong aid,
Hades had whelmed, and hopeless ruin swamped
All men that breathe. Such were my crimes:
* * * * *
And here I lie, in cunning torment stretched,
A spectacle inglorious to Jove.
Presently Ocean appears, and advises Prometheus to yield. Prometheus
scornfully refuses, and Ocean, fearful of being found in bad company,
prudently retires, whereupon, after a mournful hymn from the chorus,
reciting the sympathy of all nations and things with Prometheus, he
proceeds to relate in detail his ministry in behalf of mankind. The
account which he gives of the primal condition of the human race is
very instructive upon our present research, as embodying, or rather as
unconsciously revealing, the complete unconsciousness of
personality--of what we call personality--among Aeschylus and his
contemporaries.
Prometheus begins by calling the whole human race at that time a babe,
and goes on to declare that
... Having eyes to see, they saw not,
And hearing, heard not, but, like dreaming phantoms,
A random life they led from year to year,
All blindly floundering on. No craft they knew
--to build--
But in the dark earth burrowed....
Numbers too I taught them ... and how
To fix their shifting thoughts by marshalled signs.
He brings the ox, the ass, and the horse into service, launches the
first boat on the sea, teaches medicine, institutes divination, and
finally
... I probed the earth
To yield its hidden wealth ...
Iron, copper, silver, gold; ...
And thus, with one short word to sum the tale,
Prometheus taught all arts to mortal men.
CHORUS.
Do good to men, but do it with discretion.
Why shouldst thou harm thyself? Good hope I nurse
To see thee soon from these harsh chains unbound,
As free, as mighty, as great Jove himself.
PROMETHEUS.
This may not be; the destined curse of things
Fate must accomplish....
Though art be strong, necessity is stronger.
CHORUS.
And who is lord of strong necessity?
PROMETHEUS.
The triform Fates and the sure-memoried Furies.
CHORUS.
And mighty Jove himself must yield to them?
PROMETHEUS.
No more than others Jove can 'scape his doom.
CHORUS.
* * * * *
There's some dread mystery in thy speech
Close-veiled.
PROMETHEUS.
* * * * The truth thou'lt know
In fitting season; now it lies concealed
In deepest darkness; for relenting Jove
Himself must woo this secret from my breast.
(This secret--so it is told in the old myths--is that Jove is to meet
his own downfall through an unfortunate marriage, and Prometheus is in
possession of the details which would enable Jove to avoid the doom.)
After a choral hymn, recommending submission to Jove, we have suddenly
the grotesque apparition of Io upon the stage. Io had been beloved by
Jove; but the jealousy of Hera, or Juno, had transformed her into a
cow, and had doomed her to wander over the world stung by an
inexpugnable gadfly, and watched by the hundred-eyed Argus. Thus,
suddenly, upon the spectacle of a man suffering from the hatred of
Jove, Aeschylus brings the spectacle of a woman suffering from the love
of Jove. Io enters with this fine outburst:
What land is this? What race of mortals
Owns this desert? Who art thou,
Rock-bound with these wintry fetters,
And for what crime tortured thus?
Worn and weary with far travel,
Tell me where my feet have borne me!
O pain! pain! pain! it stings and goads me again,
The fateful gadfly!--save me, O Earth!--avaunt,
Thou horrible shadow of the earth-born Argus!
Could not the grave close up thy hundred eyes,
But thou must come,
Haunting my path with thy suspicious look,
Unhoused from Hades?
Avaunt! avaunt! why wilt thou hound my track,
The famished wanderer on the waste sea-shore?
After much talk, Io now relates her mournful story, and, supported by
the Chorus, persuades Prometheus to prophesy the very eventful future
which awaits her when her wanderings are over. In this prophetic
account of her travels, Aeschylus gives a soul-expanding review of land
after land according to the geographic and ethnic notions of his time;
and here Mr. Blackie, whose translation of the Prometheus I have been
partly quoting from, sometimes reproduces his author in very large and
musical measures. For example, Prometheus chants:
When thou hast crossed the narrow stream that parts
The continents, to the far flame-faced East
Thou shalt proceed, the highway of the sun;
Then cross the sounding ocean, till thou reach
Cisthene and the Gorgon plains, where dwell
Phorcys' three daughters, maids with frosty eld,
White as the swan, with one eye and one tooth
Shared by the three; them Phoebus, beamy-bright
Beholds not, nor the nightly moon. Near them
Their winged sisters dwell, the Gorgons dire,
Man-hating monsters, snaky-locked, whom eye
Of mortal ne'er might look upon and live.
* * * * One more sight remains
That fills the eye with horror. * * *
The sharp-beaked Griffins, hounds of Jove, avoid,
Fell dogs that bark not; and the one-eyed host
Of Arimaspian horsemen with swift hoofs
Beating the banks of golden-rolling Pluto.
A distant land, a swarthy people next
Receives thee: near the fountains of the sun
They dwell by Ethiop's wave. This river trace
Until thy weary feet shall reach the pass
Whence from the Bybline heights the sacred Nile
Pours his salubrious flood. The winding wave
Thence to triangled Egypt guides thee, where
A distant home awaits thee, fated mother
Of an unstoried race.
In this strain Prometheus continues to foretell the adventures of Io
until her son Epaphus, monarch of Egypt, is born, who will
be--through the fifty daughters celebrated in _The Suppliants_ of
Aeschylus--the ancestor of Hercules, which Hercules is to be the
deliverer of Prometheus himself.
Then in a frenzy of pain, Io departs, while the Chorus bursts into a
hymn deploring such ill-matched unions as that of Io with Jove, and
extolling marriage between equals.
After the exit of Io--to finish our summary of the play--the action
hastens to the end; the chorus implores Prometheus to submit:
presently, Hermes or Mercury appears, and tauntingly counsels
surrender, only to be as tauntingly repulsed by Prometheus; and, after
a sharp passage of wits between these two, accompanied by indignant
outbursts from the Chorus at the pitilessness of Hermes, the play
ceases with a speech from Prometheus describing the new punishment of
Jove:
Now in deed and not in discourse,
The firm earth quakes.
Deep and loud the ambient thunder
Bellows, and the flaring lightning
Wreathes his fiery curls around me
And the whirlwind rolls his dust,
And the winds from rival regions
Rush in elemental strife,
And the sky is destroyed with the sea.
Surely now the tyrant gathers
All his hoarded wrath to whelm me.
Mighty Mother, worshipped Themis,
Circling Aether that diffusest
Light, the common joy of all,
Thou beholdest these my wrongs!
Thus in the crash of elements the play ends. Fortunately our purpose
with this huge old story thus treated by Aeschylus, lays us under no
necessity to involve ourselves in endless discussions of the
Sun-myths, of the connection between ox-horned Io and the sacred
Egyptian cow Isis; of moral interpretations which vary with every
standpoint. The extent to which these _do_ vary is amusingly
illustrated in an interpretation of the true significance of
Prometheus, which I recently happened to light upon, made by a certain
Mr. Newton, who published an elaborate work a few years ago in defence
of the strictly vegetable diet. Mr. Newton would not have us misapply
fire to cookery; and in this line of thought he interprets the old
fable that Prometheus stole fire from heaven and was punished by being
chained to Caucasus with a vulture to gnaw his liver. The simple fact,
says our vegetarian, is that "Prometheus first taught the use of
animal food, and of fire with which to render it more pleasing, etc.,
to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the
consequences of the inventions" (these consequences being all manner
of gastric and other diseases which Newton attributes to the use of
animal food), "were amused or irritated at the short-sighted devices
of the ... creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of
them." In short, the chaining to a rock, with a vulture to gnaw his
liver, is simply a very satisfactory symbol for dyspepsia.
Untroubled by these entanglements, which thus reach from Max Muller,
with his Sun-wanderings, to the dyspeptic theory of our vegetarian;
our present concern is less with what Aeschylus or his fable meant than
with the frame of mind of the average man who sat in his audience, and
who listened to these matters with favor, who accepted this picture of
gods and men without rebellion. My argument is, that if this average
man's sense of personality had not been most feeble he could _not_
have accepted this picture at all. Permit me, then, to specify three
or four of the larger features of it before we go on to contrast the
treatment of this fable by Aeschylus with that by Shelley and Taylor in
a later age.
In the first place, then, since we are mainly meditating upon the
growth of human personality, I beg you to observe the complete lack of
all provision for such growth, either among the gods or the men of
this presentation. Consider Hephaestus, for example, or Vulcan. Vulcan
may hammer away, immortal as he is, for a million aeons upon the
thunderbolts of Jove; he may fashion and forge until he has exhausted
the whole science and art of offensive and defensive armament; but how
much better off is Vulcan for that? he can never step upon a higher
plane,--he is to all eternity simply Vulcan, armorer to Jove. And so
Hermes or Mercury may carry messages eternally, but no more; his
faculty and apparatus go to that end and no farther. But these
limitations are intolerable to the modern personality. The very
conception of personality seems to me to imply a conception of growth.
If I do one thing to-day, another to-morrow, I am twice as much
to-morrow as I was to-day, by virtue of the new thing; or, even if I
do only the same thing to-morrow that I did to-day, I do it
easier,--that is, with a less expenditure of force, which leaves me a
little surplus; and by as much as this surplus (which I can apply to
something else), I am more than I was yesterday. This "more"
represents the growth which I said was implied in the very conception
of personality, of the continuous individual.
Now the feeling of all this appears to be just as completely asleep in
Aeschylus himself and in all his precedent old Greek theogonists as it
is in the most witless boor who gazes open-mouthed at the gigantic
Prometheus. But if we here descend from the gods, to the men, of this
picture, we find Prometheus almost in terms asserting this absence of
personality among the men whom he taught which we have just found by
implication among the gods who tortured him.
You will remember the lines I read from the first long speech of
Prometheus, in which he describes the utterly brutish, crawling
cave-dwellers to whom he communicated the first idea of every useful
art. The denial of all power in man himself, once he was created, of
originating these inventions--that is, of growing--that is, of
personality--is complete.
I find nothing so subtly and inconsolably mournful among all the
explicit miseries of the Greek mythology as this fixity of nature in
the god or the man, by which the being is suspended, as it were, at a
certain point of growth, there to hang forever. And in this view the
whole multitudinous people, divine and human, of the whole Greek
cyclics, seem to me as if sculptured in a half relief upon the black
marble wall of their fate--in half relief because but half gods and
half men, who in the lack of personality cannot grow, cannot move.
When Keats stands regarding the figures sculptured upon the Grecian
urn, it is only a cunning sign of the unspeakable misery of his own
life that he finds the youth happy because though he can never succeed
in his chase he can never fall any farther behind in it; to Keats'
teased aspiration a certain sense of rest comes out of the very fixity
of a man suspended in marble.
"Fair youth beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss
Though winning near the goal! Yet do not grieve:
She cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love and she be fair."
A true old Greek despair fills these lines with a sorrow which is all
the more penetrating when we hear it surging out from among the keen
and energetic personalities of modern times,--personalities which will
not accept any youth's happiness of being howsoever near to his love
if that happiness be coupled with the condition that he is never to be
nearer,--personalities which find their whole summary in continuous
growth, increase, movement.
And if we remember that even when the condition of primal man is very
far from the miserable state depicted by Prometheus, the case grows
all the stronger of that Golden Age in which the antique imagination
took great delight, not all unshared, it must be confessed, by later
times, fails to please the modern personality. For example in
Chaucer's poem called _Aetas Prima_, that is, the first or Golden Age,
we have the most engaging picture of man in a pre-Promethean time,
drawn at a far different point of view from that of Prometheus in our
play.
How taking seems this simplicity:
"A blisful lyfe, a peseable and so swete,
Leddyn the peplis in the former age;
Thei helde them paied with the frutes they ete,
Wich that the feldes gafe them by usage;
Thei etyn most hawys and such pownage
And dronken watyr of the colde welle.
Yet was the ground not woundyd with the plough,
But corne upsprange onsowe of mannes hand;
No man yit knew the furous of hys land:
No man yit fier owt of the flynt fand.
No flesche ne wyst offence of hegge or spere;
No coyne ne knew man whiche was false or trewe:
No shyppe yit karfe the wawys grene and blewe:
No marchand yit ne fet owtlandische ware.
Yit were no palys chambris, ne no hallys;
In cavys and in wodes soft and swete
Sleptyn thys blessyd folk withowte wallys
On grasse or levys in parfite joy and quiete.
Unforgyd was the hauberke and the plate;
The lambisshe pepyl, voyd of alle vice,
Hadden noo fantasye to debate,
But eche of hem wold oder well cheriche:
No pride, none envy, none avarice,
No lord, no taylage by no tyrannye,
Humblesse, and pease, good fayth the emprise.
Yit was not Jupiter the likerous,
That first was fadyr of delicacye
Come in thys world, ne Nembroth desirous
To raygne hadde not made hys towrys hyghe.
Alas! alas! now may men weep and crye,
For in owre days is is not but covetyse,
Doublenesse, treson, and envye,
Poysonne, manslawtyr, mordre in sondri wyse."
Surely this is all soothing and enchanting enough; one cannot escape
the amiable complacencies which breathe out from this placid scene;
but what modern man would soberly agree to exchange a single moment of
this keen, breezy, energetic, growing existence of ours for a
Methusaleh's life in this golden land where nature does not offer
enough resistance to educe manhood or to furnish material for art, and
where there is absolutely no room, no chance, no need, no conception
of this personality that if rightly felt makes the humblest life one
long enchantment of the possible. The modern personality confronted
with these pictures, after the first glamour is gone, is much minded
to say, with the sharp-witted Glaucon, in Plato's _Republic_,
according to Jowett: "after all, a state of simplicity is a city of
pigs."
But secondly, the cumbrous apparatus of power with which Aeschylus
presents us in this play is a conception of people not acquainted with
that model of infinite compactness which every man finds in his own
_ego_. Jove, instead of speaking a word and instantly seeing the deed
result, must rely first upon his two ministers, Might and Force, who
in the first scene of our play have hauled in the Titan Prometheus;
these, however, do not suffice, but Hephaestus must be summoned in
order to nail him to the rocks; and Jove cannot even learn whether or
not his prisoner is repentant until Hermes, the messenger, visits
Prometheus and returns. The modern _ego_ which, though one
indivisible, impalpable unit, yet remembers, reasons, imagines, loves,
hates, fears and does a thousand more things all within its little
scope, without appliances or external apparatus--such an _ego_ regards
such a Jove much in the light of that old Spanish monarch in whose
court various duties were so minutely distributed and punctiliously
discharged, that upon a certain occasion (as is related), the monarch
being seated too near the fire, and the proper functionary for
removing him being out of call, his majesty was roasted to death in
the presence of the entire royal household.
And as the third feature of the unpersonality revealed in this play,
consider the fact that it is impossible for the modern reader to find
himself at all properly terror-stricken by the purely physical
paraphernalia of thunder, of storms, of chains, of sharp bolts, and
the like, which constitute the whole resources of Jove for the
punishment of Prometheus.
The modern direct way of looking at things--the perfectly natural
outcome of habit of every man's dealing with a thing for himself and
of first necessarily looking to see what the thing actually is--this
directness of vision cannot help seeing that Prometheus is a god,
that he is immortal, that thunder cannot kill him, that the bolt
through his breast makes no wound, but will repair itself with ease,
that he not only knows all this, but knows further that it is to end
(as Prometheus himself declares in the play), in his own triumph.
Under these circumstances the whole array of whirlwinds and lightnings
become a mere pin-scratch; the whole business is a matter of that
purely physical pain which every man is ashamed to make a noise of. We
can conceive a mere man fronting all these terrors of storm and
thunder with unbowed head and serene countenance, in the consciousness
that the whitest of these lightnings cannot singe an eyelash of his
immortal personality; how, then, can it be expected that we shall be
greatly impressed with the endurance of these ills by a god to whose
greater resistive endowment the whole system of this gross
thrust-and-smite of iron and fire is no more than the momentary tease
of a gnat! To the audience of Aeschylus, not so; they shiver and groan;
they know not themselves.
I do not know how I can better show the grossness of this conception
of pain than by opposing to it a subtile modern conception thereof
whose contrast will fairly open out before us the truly prodigious
gulf between the average personality of the time of Aeschylus and that
of ourselves. The modern conception, I refer to is Keats' Ode on
Melancholy; which, indeed, if one may say a word _obiter_, out of the
fullness of one's heart--I am often inclined to think for all-in-all,
that is, for thoughts most mortally compacted, for words which come
forth, each trembling and giving off light like a morning-star, and
for the pure beauty of the spirit and strength and height of the
spirit,--which, I say, for all-in-all, I am often inclined to think,
reaches the highest height yet touched in the lyric line.
ODE ON MELANCHOLY.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By night-shade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
Or in the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Imprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty--Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-moth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
V.
The main direction of our studies has been indicated in the preceding
lectures to such an extent that from this point forward our customary
review may be omitted. In examining the _Prometheus_ of Aeschylus we
have found three particulars, in which not only Aeschylus, but his
entire contemporary time shows complete unconsciousness of the most
precious and essential belongings of personality. These particulars
were, (1), the absolute impossibility of growth, implicitly affirmed
of the gods and explicitly affirmed of men in the passages which were
read; (2) the awkwardness of Jove's apparatus of power which included
a minister for every kind of act--as contrasted with the elasticity
and much-in-little which each man must perceive in regarding the
action of his own mind; and (3) the gross and purely physical
character of the punishments used by Jove to break the spirit of
Prometheus. It was contended, you remember, that if the audience of
Aeschylus had acquired that direct way of looking phenomena in the
face, which is one of the incidents of our modern personality, they
would have perceived such an inadequacy between the thunders and
earthquakes of Jove, on the one hand, and the immortal spirit of a
Titan and a god like Prometheus, on the other, that the play, instead
of being a religious and impressive spectacle to them, as it doubtless
was, would have been simply a matter of ridicule, or at best one of
those mere _dilettante_ entertainments where of our own free will we
forgive the grossest violations of common sense and propriety for the
sake of the music or the scenery with which they are associated, as
for example at the Italian opera, or the Christmas pantomime.
This last particular brings us directly upon Shelley's play of the
_Prometheus Unbound_.
We have seen that Aeschylus had a fit audience for this fable, and was
working upon emotions which are as deep as religion; but now, when we
come down 2300 years to a time from which the Aeschylean religious
beliefs have long exhaled, and when the enormous growth of personality
has quite rolled away the old lumpish terror that stood before the
cave of the physical and darkened it, in such a time it would, of
course, be truly amazing if a man like Shelley should have elaborated
this same old Prometheus fable into a lyrical drama in the expectation
of shaking the souls of men with this same old machinery of thunder,
whirlwind and earthquake.
Such a mistake--the mistake of tearing the old fable forcibly away
from its old surroundings, and of setting it in modern thoughts before
modern men, would be much the same with that which Emerson has noted
in his poem _Each and All_:
"I thought of the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;
I brought him home in his nest at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now,
For I did not bring home the river and sky--
He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
Bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave;
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.
I wiped away the weeds and foam
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild sea-shore."
Accordingly, it is instructive, as we look into Shelley's work, to
observe how this inability of his to bring home the river and the sky
along with the sparrow--this inability to bring a Greek-hearted
audience to listen to his Greek fable--operated to infuse a certain
tang of insincerity, of dilettantism, whenever he attempts to
reproduce upon us the old terrors of thunder and lightning which
Aeschylus found so effective. We--we moderns--cannot for our lives help
seeing the man in his shirt-sleeves who is turning the crank of the
thunder-mill behind the scenes; nay, we are inclined to ask with a
certain proud indignation, How is it that you wish us to tremble at
this mere resinous lightning, when we have seen a man (not a Titan nor
a god), one of ourselves go forth into a thunder-storm and send his
kite up into the very bosom thereof, and fairly entice the lightning
by his wit to come and perch upon his finger, and be the tame bird of
him and his fellows thereafter and forever? But, secondly, it is still
more conclusive upon our present point, of the different demands made
by the personality of our time from that of Aeschylus, to observe how
Shelley's own sense of this difference, his own modern instinct, has
led him to make most material alterations of the old fable, not only
increasing the old list of physical torments with a number that are
purely spiritual and modern, but also by dignifying at once the
character of Prometheus and the catastrophe of the play with that
enormous motive of forgiveness which seems to be the largest outcome
of the developed personality. Many of you are aware of the scholastic
belief that the _Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus was but the middle play
of a trilogy, and that the last showed us a compromise effected
between Prometheus and Jove, according to which Prometheus reveals the
fatal secret concerning Jove's marriage, and Jove makes a new league
of amity with the Titan. We have a note of this change in treatment in
the very opening lines of Shelley's play--which I now beg to set
before you in the briefest possible sketch. Scene I. of Act I. opens
according to the stage direction--upon _A ravine of icy rocks in the
Indian Caucasus: Prometheus is discovered bound to the precipice:
Panthea and Ione are seated at his feet: time, night: during the
scene, morning slowly breaks_. Prometheus begins to speak at once. I
read only here and there a line selected with special reference to
showing the change of treatment I have indicated as due to that
intenser instinct of personality which Shelley shared in common with
his contemporaries over Aeschylus and his contemporaries.
Prometheus exclaims:
"Monarch of gods and demons, and all spirits
But one, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes!...
Three thousand years of sleep-unsheltered hours,
And moments aye divided by keen pangs
Till they seemed years, torture and solitude,
Scorn and despair,--these are mine empire,
More glorious far than that which thou surveyest
From thine unenvied throne!"
Here we have the purely spiritual torments of "solitude, scorn and
despair" set before us; though Shelley retains and even multiplies the
physical torments of Aeschylus. A few lines further on, in this same
long opening speech of Prometheus, we have them thus described:
"Nailed to this wall of eagle-baffling mountain,
Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured; without herb,
Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of life.
The crawling glaciers pierce me with the spears
Of their moon-freezing crystals; the bright chains
Eat with their burning cold into my bones.
... The earthquake fiends are charged
To wrench the rivets from my quivering wounds
When the rocks split and close again behind;
While from their wild abysses howling throng
The genii of the storm, urging the rage
Of whirlwind, and afflict me with keen hail."
And presently, when after the repulse of Mercury Jove begins to stir
up new terrors, we hear Ione exclaiming:
"O, sister, look! white fire
Has cloven to the roots yon huge snow-loaded cedar;
How fearfully God's thunder howls behind!"
But even in Shelley's array of these terrors we perceive a cunning
outcrop of modernness in a direction which I have not yet mentioned
but which we will have frequent occasion to notice when we come to
read the modern novel together; and that is in the detail of the
description Aeschylus paints these conclusions with a big brush, and
three sweeps of it; Shelley itemizes them.
It is worth while observing too, that the same spirit of detail in
modern criticism forces us to convict Shelley here of an inconsistency
in his scene; for how could this "snow-loaded cedar" of Ione exist
with propriety in a scene which Prometheus himself has just described
as "without herb, insect, or beast, or sound of life?"
The same instinct of modernness both in the spirituality of the
torment and in the minuteness of its description displays itself a
little farther on in the curse of Prometheus. Prometheus tells us in
this same opening speech that long ago he uttered a certain awful
curse against Jove which he now desires to recall; but it would seem
that in order to recall it he wishes to hear the exact words of it.
"What was that curse?"--he exclaims at the end of the speech; "for ye
all heard me speak." To this question we have page after page of
replies from five voices--namely, the Voice of the Mountains, of the
Springs, of the Air, of the Whirlwinds and of the Earth--embodying
such a mass of falsetto sublimity that Shelley himself would surely
have drawn his pen through the whole, if he had lived into the term of
manhood.
Finally the whole awkward device for getting the curse of Prometheus
before the reader is consummated by raising up the phantasm of Jupiter
which repeats the curse, word for word.
In truth, Shelley appears always to have labored under an essential
immaturity: it is very possible that if he had lived a hundred years
he would never have become a man: he was penetrated with modern ideas,
but penetrated as a boy would be, crudely, overmuch, and with a
constant tendency to the extravagant and illogical: so that I call him
the modern boy.
These considerations quite cover the remaining three acts of his
_Prometheus Unbound_ and render it unnecessary for me to quote from
them in support of the passages already cited.
The first act contains, indeed, nearly the substance of the whole
drama. Act II contains no important motive except the visit of Asia
and Panthea to Demogorgon under the earth. In the third act we have a
view of Jove surrounded by his ministers; but in the midst of a short
speech to them he is suddenly swept into hell for everlasting
punishment. Here, of course, Shelley makes a complete departure from
the old story of the compromise between Jove and Prometheus; Shelley
makes Prometheus scornfully reject such a compromise and allow Jove to
go down to his doom. Hercules then unbinds Prometheus who repairs to a
certain exquisite interlunar cave and there dwells in tranquillity
with his beloved Asia.
The rest of Act III. is filled with long descriptions of the change
which comes upon the world with the dethronement of Jove. Act IV. is
the most amazing piece of surplusage in literature; the catastrophe
has been reached long ago in the third act. Jove is in eternal duress,
Prometheus has been liberated and has gone with Asia and Panthea to
his eternal paradise above the earth, and a final radiant picture of
the reawakening of man and nature under the new regime has closed up
the whole with the effect of a transformation-scene. Yet, upon all
this, Shelley drags in Act IV. which is simply leaden in action and
color alongside of Act III. and in which the voices of unseen spirits,
the chorus of Hours, Jove, Panthea, Demogorgon, the Earth and the Moon
pelt each other with endless sweetish speeches that rain like
ineffectual comfits in a carnival of silliness. For example, a Voice
of Unseen Spirits cries:
"Bright clouds float in heaven,
Dew-stars gleam on earth,
Waves assemble on ocean:
They are gathered and driven
By the storm of delight, by the panic of glee!
They shake with emotion,
They dance in their mirth.
But where are ye?
The pine boughs are singing
Old songs with new gladness;
The billows and fountains
Fresh music are flinging
Like the notes of a spirit from land and from sea;
The storms mock the mountains
With the thunder of gladness.
But where are ye?"
The people thus inquired for, being the chorus of Hours, sleepily
reply:
"The voice of the spirits of air and of earth
Has drawn back the figured curtain of sleep
Which covered our being and darkened our birth
In the deep."
A VOICE.
In the deep?
SEMI-CHORUS.
Oh, below the deep.
....
SEMI-CHORUS I.
We have heard the lute of Hope in sleep;
We have known the voice of love in dreams,
We have felt the wand of power come and leap--
SEMI-CHORUS II.
"As the billows leap in the morning beams,"
CHORUS.
"Weave the dance on the floor of the breeze,
Pierce with song heaven's silent light,
Enchant the day that too swiftly flees,
To check its flight ere the cave of night.
Once the hungry Hours were hounds
Which chased the day like a bleeding deer,
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desert year.
But now oh! weave the mystic measure
Of music, and dance, and shapes of light;
Let the Hours and the spirits of night and pleasure
Like the clouds and sunbeams unite."
CHORUS OF SPIRITS.
"We join the throng
Of the dance and the song,
By the whirlwind of gladness borne along;
As the flying-fish leap
From the Indian deep
And mix with the sea-birds half asleep."
This long lyric outburst, wholly unnecessary to an action which was
already complete, seems an instructive fact to place before young
writers in a time when many souls which might be poetic gardens if
they would compact all their energies into growing two roses and a
lily--three poems in all, for a lifetime--become instead mere wastes
of profuse weeds that grow and are cut down and cast into the oven
with each monthly magazine.
But it would not be fair to leave Shelley with this flat taste in our
mouths, and I will therefore beg to finish our examination of the
_Prometheus Unbound_ by three quotations from these last acts, in
which his modernness of detail and of subtlety,--being exercised upon
matters capable of such treatment--has made for us some strong and
beautiful poetry. Here for instance at the opening of Scene I. Act II.
we have a charming specimen of the modern poetic treatment of nature
and of landscape, full of spirituality and full of detail. The stage
direction is "Morning; A Lovely Vale in the Indian Caucasus. Asia,
alone." Asia, who is the lovely bride of Prometheus, is awaiting
Panthea who is to come with news of him. She begins with an invocation
of the Spring.
ASIA.
"From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended!
Yea, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes
Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,
And beatings haunt the desolated heart
Which should have learnt repose, thou hast descended
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
O child of many winds! As suddenly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet!
Like genius, or like joy which riseth up ...
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desert of our life.
This is the season, this the day, the hour;
At sunrise thou shouldst come, sweet sister mine.
Too long desired, too long delaying, come!
How like death-worms the wingless moments crawl!
The point of one white star is quivering still
Deep in the orange light of widening morn
Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm
Of wind-divided mist the darker lake
Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again
As the waves fade, and as the burning threads
Of woven cloud unravel the pale air:
'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow
The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not
The Aeolian music of her sea-green plumes
Winnowing the crimson dawn?"
And here we find some details of underwater life which are modern. Two
fauns are conversing: one inquires where live certain delicate spirits
whom they hear talking about the woods, but never meet. We are here in
an atmosphere very much like that of _The Midsummer-Night's Dream_. I
scarcely know anything more compact of pellucid beauty: it seems quite
worthy of Shakspeare.
"SECOND FAUN.
'Tis hard to tell:
I have heard those more skill'd in spirits say,
The bubbles, which th' enchantment of the sun
Sucks from the pale faint water-flowers that pave
The oozy bottom of clear lakes and pools,
Are the pavilions where such dwell and float
Under the green and golden atmosphere
Which noontide kindles through the woven leaves;
And when these burst, and the thin fiery air,
The which they breathed within those lucent domes,
Ascends to flow like meteors through the night,
They ride in them, and rein their headlong speed,
And bow their burning crests, and glide in fire
Under the waters of the earth again."
Here again, in my third extract, we have poetry which is as strong as
the other is dainty, and which is as modern as geology. Asia is
describing a vision in which the successive deposits in the crust of
the earth are revealed to her. The whole treatment is detailed,
modern, vivid, powerful.
"... The beams flash on
And make appear the melancholy ruins
Of cancell'd cycles: anchors, beaks of ships;
Planks turn'd to marble; quivers, helms, and spears;
And gorgon-headed targes, and the wheels
Of scythed chariots, and the emblazonry
Of trophies, standards, and armorial beasts,
Round which death laugh'd, sepulchred emblems
Of dread destruction, ruin within ruin!
Whose population which the earth grew over
Was mortal, but not human; see, they lie,
Their monstrous works and uncouth skeletons,
Their statues, domes, and fanes, prodigious shapes
Huddled in gray annihilation, split,
Jamm'd in the hard, black deep; and over these
The anatomies of unknown winged things,
And fishes which were isles of living scale,
And serpents, bony chains, twisted around
The iron crags, or within heaps of dust
To which the torturous strength of their last pangs
Had crushed the iron crags; and over these
The jagged alligator, and the might
Of earth-convulsing behemoth, which once
Were monarch beasts, and on the slimy shores,
And weed-overgrown continents of earth,
Increased and multiplied like summer worms
On an abandoned corpse till the blue globe
Wrapt deluge round it like a cloak, and they
Yelled, gasped, and were abolished; or some God,
Whose throne was in a comet, past, and cried
Be not! And like my words they were no more."
Shelley appears not to have been completely satisfied with the
Prometheus story. This dissatisfaction displays itself in a
characteristic passage of his preface to the Prometheus, which happens
very felicitously to introduce the only other set of antique
considerations I shall offer you on this subject. "Let this
opportunity," (he says in one place) "be conceded to me of
acknowledging that I have what a Scotch philosopher characteristically
terms 'a passion for reforming the world'.... But it is a mistake to
suppose that I dedicate my poetical compositions solely to the direct
enforcement of reform, or that I consider them in any degree as
containing a reasoned system on the theory of human life....
... Should I live to accomplish what I purpose, that is, produce a
systematical history of what appear to me to be the genuine elements
of human society, let not the advocates of injustice and superstition
flatter themselves that I should take Aeschylus rather than Plato as my
model."
In Shelley's poem we have found much of the modernness between the
lines, or appearing as the result, merely, of that spirit of the time
which every writer must share to a greater or less extent with his
fellow-beings of the same period. But as we proceed now to examine
Bayard Taylor's poem, _Prince Deukalion_, we find a man not only
possessed with modernness, but consciously possessed; so that what was
implicit in Shelley--and a great deal more--here becomes explicit and
formulated.
As one opens the book, a powerful note of modernness in the drama, as
opposed to the drama of Aeschylus, strikes us at the outset in the
number of the actors. One may imagine the amazement of old Aeschylus as
he read down this truly prodigious array of _dramatos prosopa_:
Eos, Goddess of the Dawn: Gaea, Goddess of the Earth; Eros; Prometheus;
Epimetheus; Pandora; Prince Deukalion; Pyrrha; Agathon; Medusa;
Calchas; Buddha; Spirits of Dawn; Nymphs; Chorus of Ghosts; Charon;
Angels; Spirits; The Nine Muses; Urania; Spirit of the Wind; Spirit of
the Snow; Spirit of the Stream; Echoes; the Youth; the Artist; the
Poet; the Shepherd; the Shepherdess; the Mediaeval Chorus; Mediaeval
Anti-Chorus; Chorus of Builders; Four Messengers. With these materials
Mr. Taylor's aim is to array before us the whole panorama of time,
painted in symbols of the great creeds which have characterized each
epoch. These epochs are four; and one act is devoted to each. In the
first act we have the passing away of nymph and satyr and the whole
antique Greek mythos; and we are shown the coming man and woman in the
persons of Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, his wife-to-be, whose figures,
however, are as yet merely etched upon a mist of prophecy.
In Act II, we have the reign and fall of the mediaeval faith, all of
which is mysteriously beheld by these same shadowy personalities,
Deukalion and Pyrrha. In Act III. the faith of the present is
similarly treated. In Act IV. we have at last the coming man, or
developed personality fairly installed as ruler of himself and of the
world, and Prince Deukalion and Pyrrha, the ideal man and the ideal
woman, now for the first time united in deed as well as in
inspiration, pace forth into the world to learn it and to enjoy it.
Mr. Taylor, as I said, is so explicit upon the points of personality
and modernness as compared with the Aeschylean play, that few
quotations would be needed from his work, and I will not attempt even
such a sketch of it as that of Shelley's. For example, in Scene 1, Act
I, of _Prince Deukalion_, Scene I being given in the stage direction
as
"_A plain sloping from high mountains towards the sea; at the base of
the mountains lofty, vaulted entrances of caverns; a ruined temple on
a rocky height; a shepherd asleep in the shadow of a clump of laurels;
the flock scattered over the plain_,"--a shepherd awakes and
wonderingly describes his astonishment at certain changes which have
occurred during his sleep. This shepherd, throughout the book, is a
symbol of the mass of the common people, the great herd of men. Voices
from various directions interrupt his ejaculations: and amongst other
utterances of this sort, we have presently one from the nymphs--as
representative of the Greek nature--myths--which is quite to our
present purpose.
NYMPHS
(Who are to the shepherd voices, and nothing more):
"Our service hath ceased for you, shepherds!
We fade from your days and your dreams,
With the grace that was lithe as a leopard's,
The joy that was swift as a stream's!
To the musical reeds, and the grasses;
To the forest, the copse, and the dell;
To the mist and the rainbow that passes,
The vine, and the goblet, farewell!
Go, drink from the fountains that flow not!
Our songs and our whispers are dumb:--
But the thing ye are doing ye know not,
Nor dream of the thing that shall come."
In Scene IV., Deukalion, leading Pyrrha, passes into a cavern, the
last mouth of Hades left on the earth. Presently, the two emerge upon
"a shadowy, colorless landscape," and are greeted by a chorus of
ghosts, which very explicitly formulates that dreary impossibility of
growth which I pointed out in the last lecture as incident to the old
conception of personality.
"CHORUS OF GHOSTS.
"Away!
Ashes that once were fires,
Darkness that once was day,
Dead passions, dead desires,
Alone can enter here!
In rest there is no strife,
* * * * *
Like some forgotten star,
What first we were, we are,
The past is adamant:
The future will not grant
That, which in all its range
We pray for--change."
In spite of these warnings, they push on, find Charon at his old place
by the dark river, but are left to row themselves across, Charon
pleading age and long-unused joints; and, after many adventures, find
Prometheus, who very distinctly declares to Prince Deukalion and
Pyrrha their mission.
"Since thou adrift,"
says Prometheus,
"And that immortal woman by thy side
Floated above submerged barbarity
To anchor, weary, on the cloven mount,
Thou wast my representative."
Prince Deukalion--as perhaps many will remember--is the Noah of the
old Promethean cyclus, and the story ran, that the drowned world was
miraculously repeopled by him and Pyrrha. In the same speech
Prometheus introduces to Deukalion as a future helper his brother
Epimetheus--one of the most striking conceptions of the old fable, and
one of the most effective characters in Mr. Taylor's presentation. We
saw in the last lecture that Prometheus was called the Provident,--the
_pro-metheus_ being a looking forward. Precisely opposite is
Epimetheus, that is, he who looks _epi_--upon or backward. Perhaps it
is a fair contrast to regard Prometheus as a symbol of striving onward
or progress; and Epimetheus as a symbol of the historic instinct,--the
instinct which goes back and clears up the past as if it were the
future; which with continual effort reconstructs it; which keeps the
to-be in full view of what has been; which reconciles progress and
conservation. Accordingly, the old story reports Epimetheus as oldest
at his birth, and growing younger with the progress of the ages.
"Take one new comfort"
says Prometheus,
Epimetheus lives.
Though here beneath the shadow of the crags.
He seems to slumber, head on nerveless knees,
His life increases; oldest at his birth,
The ages heaped behind him shake the snow
From hoary locks, and slowly give him youth,
"Tis he shall be thy helper: Brother, rise!
EPIMETHEUS--(_coming forward_)
I did not sleep: I mused. Ha! comest thou, Deukalion?
PROMETHEUS.
Soon thy work shall come!
Shame shall cease
When midway on their paths our mighty schemes
Meet, and complete each other! Yet my son,
Deukalion--yet one other guide I give,
Eos!"
And presently Prometheus leads Deukalion and Pyrrha to what is
described in the stage-direction as "_The highest verge of the rocky
table-land of Hades, looking eastward_." Eos is summoned by
Prometheus, much high conversation ensues, and this, the sixth and
last scene of the first Act ends thus:
EOS, (_addressing young Deukalion and Pyrrha_.)
Faith, when none believe;
Truth, when all deceive;
Freedom, when force restrained;
Courage to sunder chains;
Pride, when good is shame;
Love, when love is blame,--
These shall call me in stars and flame!
Thus if your souls have wrought,
Ere ye approach me, I shine unsought."
But Eos proceeds to warn Deukalion and Pyrrha of long trial, and of
many disappointments, closing thus:
"When darkness falls,
And what may come is hard to see;
When solid adamant walls
Seem built against the Future that shall be;
When Faith looks backward, Hope dies, Life appals,
Think most of Morning and of me!
[The rosy glow in the sky fades away]
PROMETHEUS (to _Prince Deukalion_),
Go back to Earth, and wait!
PANDORA (to _Pyrrha_),
Go: and fulfil our fate!"
This sketch of the first Act of Taylor's work is so typical of the
remainder that I need not add quotations from the second, or third, or
fourth Act: the explicit modernness of the treatment, the
spirituality, the personality, of it, everywhere forms the most
striking contrast to the treatment of Aeschylus; and I will close the
case as to _Prince Deukalion_ by quoting the subtle and wise words of
Prometheus which end the play. The time is the future: the coming man
and woman, Deukalion and Pyrrha, after long trial, and long
separation, are at last allowed to marry, and to begin their earthly
life. These are Prometheus' parting words to them. It would be
difficult to imagine one plane of thought farther removed from another
than is that of the time-spirit which here speaks through Taylor, from
the time-spirit which speaks through Aeschylus. Remembering the
relations between man and inexorable nature, between man and the
exterminating god which we saw revealed by the Prometheus of Aeschylus,
listen to these relations prophesied by the Prometheus of Taylor,--
"Retrieve perverted destiny!"
(In Aeschylus, when once "destiny" is about, all retrieval grows
absurd.)
'Tis this shall set your children free.
The forces of your race employ
To make sure heritage of joy;
Yet feed, with every earthly sense,
Its heavenly coincidence,--
That, as the garment of an hour,
This, as an everlasting power.
For Life, whose source not here began,
Must fill the utmost sphere of Man,
And so expanding, lifted be
Along the line of God's decree,
To find in endless growth all good;
In endless toil, beatitude.
Seek not to know Him; yet aspire
As atoms toward the central fire!
Not lord of race is He, afar,--
Of Man, or Earth, or any star,
But of the inconceivable All;
Whence nothing that there is can fall
Beyond Him, but may nearer rise,
Slow-circling through eternal skies.
His larger life ye cannot miss,
In gladly, nobly using this.
Now, as a child in April hours
Clasps tight its handful of first flowers,
Homeward, to meet His purpose, go!
These things are all ye need to know.
We have seen that Shelley thought of producing a history of "the
genuine elements of human society," taking Plato as his model, instead
of Aeschylus. Had he done so, how is it likely he would have fared? It
so happens that of all the monstrosities of thought which we find in
the whole Greek cultus, based upon the failure to conceive
personality, the most monstrous are those which originated with Plato.
And since you have now heard this word personality until your patience
must be severely taxed, I am glad to say that I can now close this
whole pending argument which I have announced as our first line of
research in a short and conclusive way by asking you to consider for a
moment the complete massacre and deliberate extermination of all those
sacred bases of personality upon which the fabric of our modern
society rests in that ideal society which Plato has embodied in his
_Republic_. Nothing is more irresistible than the conviction that the
being who planned Plato's _Republic_ could neither have had the least
actual sense of his own personality nor have recognized even
theoretically the least particle of its real significance. Fortunately
this examination can be made with great brevity by confining our
attention to the three quite conclusive matters of marriage, children,
and property as they are provided for in Book V. of Plato's
_Republic_.
At line 460 of that book we find Socrates inquiring: "And how can
marriages be made most beneficial" in our ideal republic? and
presently answering his own question in due form. I quote here and
there, to make the briefest possible showing of the plan. "Why the
principle has been already laid down, that the best of either sex
should be united with the best as often as possible; and that
inferiors should be prevented from marrying at all." "Now these goings
on must be a secret which the rulers only know, ... or there will be a
farther danger of our herd ... breaking into rebellion." To these ends
we had "better appoint certain festivals at which the brides and
bridegrooms" (whom the rulers have previously selected with care and
secrecy) "will be brought together, and sacrifices will be offered and
suitable hymeneal songs composed by our poets;" ... and we "invent
some ingenious kind of lots which the less worthy may draw." In short,
the provision for marriage is that the rulers shall determine each
year how many couples shall marry, and shall privately designate a
certain number of the healthiest couples for that purpose; at the
annual festival all marriageable couples assemble and draw lots, these
lots having previously been so arranged that all unhealthy or in any
way inferior couples shall draw blanks. Of course this is fraud; but
Plato defends it against Glaucon's objection thus: since "our rulers
will have to practice on the body corporate with medicines, our rulers
will find a considerable dose of these" (that is, of falsehood and
deceit) "necessary for the good of their subjects; ... and this lawful
use of them seems likely to be often needed in the regulations of
marriages." The couples thus married eat at a common table. A brave
youth, as a reward of valor, is allowed more than one wife.
Such are the marriage-arrangements of Plato's ideal republic, except
that I have omitted all the most monstrous provisions, giving only the
rosiest view of it. Reserving comment, let us see how the children are
provided for. Immediately after birth "The proper officers will take
the offspring of the good" or (healthy) "parents to" a certain common
"fold, and there ... deposit them with certain nurses; but the
offspring of the inferior, or of the better where they chance to be
deformed, will be put away in some mysterious unknown place, as
decency requires;" the mothers are afterwards allowed to come to the
fold to nourish the children, but the officers are to take the
greatest care that "no mother recognizes her own child:" of course
these children, when they grow up are to be also bridegrooms and
brides, and the problem of how to prevent unknown brothers and
sisters, and the like,--from marrying is duly attended to: but the
provisions for this purpose are at once so silly and so beastly--nay,
they out-beast the beasts--that surely no one can read them without
wishing to blot out the moment in which he did so.
And lastly property is thus disposed of. "Then" (line 482, Bk. V.
Republic) "the community of wives and children is clearly the source
of the greatest good to the State, ... and agrees with the other
principle that the guardians"--the guardians are the model citizens of
this ideal republic--"are not to have houses or lands or any other
property; their pay is to be their food and they are to have no
private expenses;... Both the community of property and the community
of families ... tend to make them more trul
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